9... on a scale of 7 to 13.

Yeppers. That happened. It happened on Thursday. Thanks to my sister, Nurse Egg, (aka Cracked Eggler who is resuming her blogging efforts which is a very delightful surprise) it was an amazing birthday. She bought me the cake pictured here. It is a strawberry cheesequake ice cream cake from Dairy Queen - chunks of cheesecake and strawberry filling frozen inside an ice cream cake. Delicious! She also showered me with gift cards and 36 cups of pudding.

It was also a great day at work, but I'll get to that mess later in a different post.

Since the start of this year and my first temp job, I have now lost 40 pounds. I'm still 20 pounds heavier than I was previous to my whole trucking experiment fiasco, but I'm working it down and will hopefully reduce beyond my previous normal weight. That's the continuing goal, anyway. From March until May I plateaued with my weight-loss efforts, but I've finally found away over, under, or around that wall. I think I can attribute a lot of that to the stress of finding another job after my first temp job imploded. Fortunately, things are going incredibly smoothly now at the second temp job at the cheese factory. But, again, I'll get to that in another post.

I slept in until 0730 this morning. Un-fucking-believable. I can not even begin to express how awesome that is to sleep past 0500 on a Saturday morning. Yes, I have two days off this weekend. I have the entire day today to do whatever the hell I want - which is probably not much at all, but that's also a good thing. I even have all of Sunday to finish doing nothing at all. How bizarre. I mowed the lawn yesterday after work so I don't have my usual chore to squeeze into my time off somewhere. I still have to do laundry, however, but that's requires the least amount of actual effort to complete. I just made some Arnold Palmer half and half Arizona instant iced tea. This is another thing Nurse Egg brought home on my birthday. Now I'm enjoying it on the deck and posting. It's not 90 bloody degrees out yet, so I'm enjoying that as well.

My phone has been misbehaving a lot lately. I get texts several hours later. It doesn't ring when I receive calls. I get only some of my voicemails. My battery life is a few hours if I'm lucky. I have to keep it plugged in at all times for it to even maybe work. I might look into having the battery replaced if I didn't hate the thing even when it is working properly and don't have very serious plans to upgrade and switch carriers in the near future. I would have done it for my birthday, but there are certain scenarios in play which require that I still be reachable by several involved parties. I am definitely planning on changing my phone number when I switch providers and upgrade, but that must wait until this whole mess is resolved. I'd rather not discuss the situation, but it's terrible and I can't wait for it to end. I sincerely hope it goes quietly into that good night. It's one of very few sources of conflict and stress in my life at the moment and I'm just not interested in prolonging or antagonizing it any further.

I've been taking a lot of surveys lately. Everyone seems incredibly interested in my opinion. I'm fine with obliging until they demand I explain my opinions in detail.

"The thing I find most appealing about expressing my personal opinions/feelings is, that being such, I'm not required to explain/defend/justify them to anyone for any reason. These are my personal opinions/feelings and they are not negotiable/debatable. Take them or leave them, because you'll never change them and I won't tolerate any attempts in that effort."

Probably not the response they were expecting. Too bad. Obviously, they should re-evaluate their expectations or bother someone else. I'm also slightly annoyed by rating scales that are not designed in multiples of 5 or 10. 6 point rating scale? Seriously? What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Who rates anything in degrees of 17%? I am 34% pleased with this product or service. No. I don't think so. It reminds me of a comment I made once to someone who wanted me to rate their performance.

"Don't worry. You're definitely a 9... on a scale of 7 to 13."

I realize this is in direct violation of what I've just said about rating scales, but it's still incredibly hilarious.