Once more unto the breach

I got to visit my favorite alley again today.

See, for my profession, there are two base credentialing exams: the CRT and the RRT.  I took the CRT back in January, but in order for me to actually graduate in May, I had to take my RRT exam today.  Well, today and yesterday, to be specific.  I was lazy and didn't feel like cramming the entire thing into one day.

Anyway, this time I had someone drop me off so I didn't have to venture passed the vagrants at the bus station, which was nice.  Instead, I got dropped off by an elementary school playground that looks ridiculously out of place in the area.  This section of town isn't horrible, but it's not the nicest.  In fact, there's a large-scale urban renewal project going on all over the city.  Which will make it lovely in about ten years, but for now it's still a mess of broken concrete and abandoned buildings.  And this shiny, brand-new elementary school playground filled with shiny, brand-new playground paraphernalia, all of which was being completely ignored by the schoolchildren in favor of huddling by the fence trying to shield their iPods and cell phones from the monitors.

Anyway, after wandering passed the children, I found myself facing the alley once again.

I took pictures this time, because I felt like some of y'all didn't quite believe me last time.   Here's some of the poorly-executed graffiti:

And the door, which has since been marked, to an extent:

I can't really say much about the tests themselves - other than I think our professors were intentionally giving us practice tests that were harder than the real thing.  I mean, they scared the bejeesus out of us when we were preparing for them, and they wasn't nearly as bad as I thought they were going to be. And all that matters is:

Erin the Great, RRT.  I kinda like the sound of that.

My life is so fascinating

This is what I generally look like on a normal day:

And this is me on vacation:

I would definitely consider myself one of those people who literally shuts down when I don't have responsibilities.  I mean, I pretty much live in one room, so it's not like it really matters that I smell funny or am not fit for human companionship.  My dogs don't seem to mind, anyway.

I did muster up the gumption to leave the house today in search of sustenance.  Not easy to come by in  a teeny tiny place like this in the middle of the off season.  Anyway, I ended up at a local 'fine dining' establishment, by which I mean all the food comes on plates and you can't actively spit peanut shells onto the floor.  I ordered a chef salad that, according to the menu, was  supposed to consist of "thinly-sliced turkey and country ham over a bed of fresh lettuce with tomatoes, onions, cheese, carrots, and boiled egg."  What I got was a plate piled high with lettuce, three sad little tomato wedges, four pieces of shredded carrot, some ham that I'm pretty sure was just lunch meat that was pulled into shreds by someone's fingers, and about a gallon of cheddar cheese.  I didn't mind the onions being missing because I don't really care for onions to being with, but no egg?  Are you kidding me?  The little pieces of boiled egg are why I EAT salads in the first place.  I basically had a ham and cheese sandwich minus the bread on my plate.

The restaurant itself was fairly empty except for the round table.  I'm sure at any local restaurant in any small town in the world there's something like this round table, unless you're in some place that doesn't have restaurants.  Or tables.  It's just this one table right by the door that is being manned by a group of men who apparently have nothing more pressing to do in their lives than sitting at this table and drinking coffee all day.  It's always men - I think they've taken a page from the Little Rascals and formed their own He-Man Woman Haters Club, only instead of a clubhouse, they have the round table.  The cast of characters is always something like this:

Theoretically, they talk about current events.  But in reality, it's just a gossipy group of old men.  They are almost always angry about some fool thing, usually involving the city sanitation department.  Today, they were talking about southern California.  This is especially hilarious when you consider the fact that most of them have probably never left our county, let alone the state.  How they think they know what's going on in Southern California is completely beyond me.