Answering Machine and Arby's Spirits: Random

• There's one parent that drives by our house to drop his kids off every morning with his radio booming. As I'm waiting for Owen's bus to pull up, I scowl at him. Not only are people trying to sleep at this hour, but his kids and their ears are in the car.
• Let the Right One In (Swedish 2008) versus Let Me In (American 2010). Same basic story. Both well done. Both stark and beautiful in their cinematography. Slightly different angles. Which one would I recommend? I have to go with LROI. It leaves more to mystery, and I always like that in a good horror movie. My imagination… well it's always scarier than anything they reveal. Which is scary on other levels.
• I'm not sure New Mexico was the best setting for a snowy movie in the American version. I get that they have snowfall in the mountains, but when I think of states with snow, I don't think New Mexico.
• Banana peppers are the gateway peppers. I'm now addicted to jalapeños. Where does it end? Habaneros? Eating actual fire?
• We visited Heidi's uncle's house for Easter lunch. He has two new kittens. As we left, Gage told us to put his kitties in the car.
• That kid cries when we leave church, which I suppose is a good thing, but also embarrassing.
• We found a gym that was running a very inexpensive trial. The catch was, you had to participate in their weight loss challenge and weigh in every two weeks. The contest ended last week. I didn't win. They split us into teams based on when we joined. So, we never met our "team mates."
• I was using the exercise bike one night when two of the winners walked up. They started talking about the gaps in weight reporting. People didn't weigh in when they were supposed to. The winners started joking that it was because those particular people obviously hadn't lost enough weight and were likely ashamed. I thought to myself, those people probably came to the gym a lot more than they used to. They should probably be proud of that alone. I think the winners have a right to be happy/proud, but so do all of us that are just getting into better shape and health than we were two months ago.
• Aren't there enough animals that are endangered that we shouldn't have to worry so much about moving them on and off the list? I mean, if we're not eating them and they're not eating us, can't we just agree that we don't need to kill them?
• Some observations on cold calling:
• People aren't as rude as I expected. Most of them will even give you about a minute of their time, which is really all I'm asking for.
• It does sting when someone does hang up on you. I can see not answering the phone. That's what I do because I find it incredibly rude to just hang up on someone that's being polite themselves.
• I usually get a few people laughing each night, in a good way.
• They still don't want an appointment with me.
• I find it incredibly strange when I stumble on a cluster of homes with the same, strange answering machine voice. This happened last week. I found four houses in a row with the same, very unique, stock voice on their answering machines. Like they all owned the exact same machine and lived next to one another. This was not your usual stock voice, it was slightly British, like a butler.
• I noticed a similar thing back when I was a manger at Arby's. We'd have a slow day. There would be nearly an hour between customers. It would be so slow that we'd stare out the windows in the front wondering what was keeping people away. And then… groups of about four cars would pull in together in a line. It was like some spirit had possessed them all at once to put their turning signals on and swing into the lot. That would be followed by another near hour of no one.
• Perhaps some spirit of answering machines possessed these neighbors to seek out the strange British answering machines. Maybe there was a very convincing door-to-door salesman with a butlerish British accent.
• I hate it when kids answer the phone. It throws me off. You just never know, it could just be an adult with a very child-like voice.