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A boring week, except for lousy realty agents...

Journal Entry entered: 2001-08-31 - 7:28 a.m.

Hrrmm... I feel the need to do an entry, but I'm not sure what to ramble or rant about.

The week has been largely uneventful, nothing wonderful or awful to go on about.

I had a doctor's appointment to check on a lump on my back that turned out to be a benign cyst. It will be removed next Thursday. Quite a relief that it's nothing more serious.

This weekend I will again be annoying and vexing my fiancée's neighbours by visiting her and hanging out in their vicinity. And, since it's a three day weekend, i get to do it for approximately 50% more time than usual! Woo hoo!.

This week's vexation has been the realty company that is trying to sell the house I live in. More specifically, the realty agents. They seem to have this idea that locking the doors to the house (after they have shown it to prospective buyers) is an optional thing. They have, on no less than four occasions left my front door or the door to the vacant unit downstairs unlocked and ajar! I live on THE busiest street on my part of town and while the neighbourhood is okay, it's not the greatest. Leaving my doors hanging wide open is a BAD thing!

The agent who is in charge of the sale is as unprofessional as anyone I have ever met. We shall call him Teflon Man, since nothing seems to impact upon him or stick to him. Teflon Man refuses to return phone calls, makes promises and never fulfills them, and is just generally a slimy character. Would that my landlord would get someone else to do this sale, but he's not willing o do anything that might cost him money or stress... and it's not HIS front door that is being left open.

I finally reached a level of anger that I have not in a long time when he dropped by at dinner time with a prospective buyer without calling to make sure it was okay. My rights as a tenant and a resident of the house demand that he ask permission to show the house and give me adequate notice. I made a couple calls and discovered who HIS boss was and I gave her a call. She may be a unethical and slimy as Teflon Man, I don't know, but she (and the landlord) appeared to take my situation seriously, especially when I threatened to change all the locks and refuse entry. We shall see if things get better now. If they don't the house gets locked until I move.

I try to be patient and understanding and all that "nice" crap. But even nice guys have their limits. Anyway, I will be adding yet another business, Coldwell - Banker, to the listing of businesses that I feel treat their customers like fecal matter. Perhaps I will place that listing in the left margin of my pages along with the list of mispellings and mispronounciations. I dunno if anyone has noticed them or gavies a darn, but that's okay.

Well, now that I've vented that little bit of steam, I can get on with being my friendly, fun-loving self.

The semester begins soon and we will in short order begin the tormenting of our undergraduate students. Ah, what fun! I have five new undergrad research assistants (RAs) who wish to learn the torture techniques we've developed here, and four returning undregrad RAs who wish o refine their techniques!

Hmm... I just realized that there is the remote possiblity that students of mine or volunteers taking part in the lab will find and read this. Well, if they can't tell it's all written in good fun, they need to reread the bit of my profile about taking one's self and others too seriously.

Well, I suppose that's it for now. Perhaps I will update whilst visiting My Vin, perhaps not. One can never tell.

- Warren


Previous journal entry | Next journal entry

Three years! - 2010-04-27

School choices... - 2007-10-03

Virginia Johnson - 2007-09-05

Tau Trivia update! - 2006-12-15

Been a while, now vote! - 2006-10-03



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Warren's list of words that monkeys use to annoy him by misspelling, misusing, or mispronouncing them (the list will most assuredly grow)

Misspellings
  • COMING (typically mispelled "comming")
  • TONGUE (typically mispelled "tounge")
Confused spellings
  • HERE vs. HEAR (the former is a place word; the latter is what you do when a sound hits your ear)
  • IT'S vs. ITS (the former is a contracted form of IT IS; the latter is a possessive form of the impersonal pronoun IT)
  • LOSING vs. LOOSING (the former is what you are doing if you are not winning; the latter is what you are doing when you let the lions out of the lion pen at the zoo, you are "loosing them" or "setting them loose").
  • POUR vs. PORE vs. POOR (the first is what you do to get milk from the carton into the glass; the second is a small opening in a surface, such as those in your skin that sweat comes out of (... don't write poetry if you don't know your English, you just look sad). The third, a state of having little or no money, is rarely confused with the other two).
  • ROGUE vs. ROUGE (The former is a person who might also be described as a rascal, scoundrel or cad; the latter is make-up that one uses to add a bit of a blush to one's cheeks.)
  • THEY'RE vs. THEIR vs. THERE (the first is a contraction of THEY ARE; the next is a possessive form of THEY; the last denotes place or location)
  • TO vs. TOO vs. TWO (the first is a function word indicating movement, direction, proximity, intention, addition: "I'm going to the store" or "Add this to the pile" or "How close is the house to the road"; the second one sort of adds quantity, often of the excessive sort, to a concept: "Too many reptiles" or "I'm coming, too"; the last represents the number 2.)
  • WHERE vs. WEAR vs. -WARE vs. WERE- (the first references place or location; the second is either a verb, noun, or suffix relating to clothing or other adornments [example: wearing footwear] OR a noun or verb relating to the effect of exposure or useage or corrosion [wear and tear]; the third is a suffix that indicates that something is a class of some sort [hardware, software, flatware, wetware]; the fourth is a prefix used to attach the disease of Lycanthropy to a person or animal, i.e: werewolf, wererat, weretiger. Finally, although pronounced differently, "WERE" is also a past tense of are or to be.)
  • YOU'RE vs. YOUR vs. YORE (the former is a contraction of YOU ARE, the middle is a possessive form of YOU, and the latter is a reference to another, undefined era in the past: "Days of yore.)
Mispronunciations
  • ASK [ask'] ("axe" is something used for chopping wood or the action of chopping something with an axe).
  • CAN [kahn] (it should not be pronounced as [kehn]). Thanks, Ken.
  • CAVALRY [kah'-val-ree] ("Calvary" is a mountain that is prominant {pun intended} in the Bible, not a military unit that rides on horses... or these days on tanks and Hum-Vees).
  • DONDER [don'-der] ("Donner" was the name of a party of travellers that got stuck in the mountains and ate each other, not the name of one of Santa's eight little reindeer).
  • ESCAPE [es-kayp'] ("excape" simply sounds dumb).
  • ESPRESSO [es-pres'-oh] (it is NOT "eXpresso," pinheads. Thanks, Mischief.
  • HUNDRED [hun'-dred] (it's not "hun'-erd" nor "hun'-red"). Thanks, Rachel.
  • INSURANCE [in-sure'-ense] (it is NOT "in'-sure-ense"! In English, the second to last syllable is the one that gets the emphasis except when asking a question, when the LAST syllable is accented... never the third to last!!!)
  • JEWELRY [jew'-el-ree] (it's not "joo-lah-ree" or "joo-luh-ree", stoner!) Thanks, again Rachel.
  • LIBRARY [lie-brayr'-ee] (there's no such thing as a "lie-berry", people!)
  • NUCLEAR [new-klee'-er] ("nuke-yuh-ler" is incorrect, Homer! Same goes for you, Dubya!!!)
  • OFTEN [aw'-fen] (the pretentious will insist on saying "awf'-Ten" but that is an archaic form and no more appropriate than saying "thee" and "thou" in colloquial English)
  • RIPON [rih'-pin] (so very many people pronounce this "rih-pon' " or "ripe'-on" that it gets on the nerves of anyone who has ever lived or gone to school there! Thanks Rachel K.
  • VIOLA [vi-o'-la] (the musical instrument is pronounced "vee-ola" but the flower and the woman's name is pronounced with an "eye", not an "ee")Thanks, Viola.