When you were here before, I couldn't look you in the eye

Tonight was our Ode to Summer party and it was pretty great. We cranked the heat in our friend Tim's house and pretended it was summer time by wearing shorts, short sleeved shirts, and drinking fruity drinks with umbrellas in them. That was pretty awesome. I brought my ukelele on which I have just learned how to play Creep. Now I need to add Joy Division to my repertoire. I also won a singular game of air hockey out of the several drunken games that I played. And I didn't even win that one on my own. Sad day.

But I really think that's all I have to contribute for tonight. Yep. Pretty sure. Still buzzing pretty severely. Also have to febreze the downstairs because my father's feet smell so god damn awful. So GROSS.

Steal Flamingos and Gnomes from the dark side of the Lawn

Got a hair cut today. Still keeping it fairly long because it bothers me to have it a length at which I can't put it in a pony tail easily and I'm no good with hair pins and clippies and things of that nature. Also cleaned out my closet today which was exciting. Threw away just a whole bunch of crap and clothes that I don't wear anymore, so hopefully this means that I can get the clothes that I do wear off of my floor. That sure would be nice, and I can be more organized about what I pack for Hawaii (slowly moving ever closer! YAY!) I also found a zip drive that contains the poster I made for a AAA (American Anthropological Association) conference that I went to about 3 years ago. I am so impressed by the skills that I had back then with the computer. It looks so professionally put together it's blowing my mind. Maybe I'll have to find a way to post it up somewhere, or back it up, because I don't know if I have it anywhere other than the zip drive that I found. Maybe on google.docs. I save a lot of stuff on there, and should really go about backing up more documents up there that I don't want to lose.

I have been writing pretty consistently lately, which feels good. I also have between 1 and 3lbs to lose before Hawaii to meet my goal. I'm excited about that because staying on track during the winter time is kind of very hard. Especially with the tasty food and parties that have been going on. I'm going to have to watch the alcohol consumption carefully on Saturday if I want to consume more on Monday. Excited for both of those things. YAY! Also have finished up some knitting projects in the last couple of days. Which is nice. I need to finish some of the socks that I've been working on...I just keep starting them and finishing one and then starting another pair and never going back to the other pair and finishing it...not so great there.

I need to get back on playing the ukelele and the guitar more often. I have not been very diligent and I feel like I may have lost a few of my skills. Not that I had many to begin with. But I feel definitely lacking at this point. I also need to restring the guitar and probably the ukelele at some point. And I've got to get that one strung by someone else because the strings go on funky like in a way that I don't understand.

I think that's all I have to talk about right now. So good bye internets. I feel irreverent and silly and need to go do some things...I do not yet know what those things are.

Saturday Night Burns a Redness on My Face

Reflecting on the past week. My days off were wonderful. My days at work were okay. I definitely stay for the people I work with and not for the bureacratic bullshit that flies around this place. It's pretty much no fun from that stand point. Managers and higher ups pulling rank at every corner and just having petty little power trips. Blegh. Don't like it.

In other work related news I have discovered the only thing that it is acceptable for your significant other to yell in the background while you are talking to a staffing clerk. It's "You're our favorite!" Because that's just kind of awesome. This person also told me I should write a book about all of the stupid shit that goes on here. I told her to think of a good nom de plume for me because I would certainly need it.

We finally got the new refridgerator for our kitchen today and now all the appliances are fancy matching stainless steel. Aren't we all the fanciest people you've ever heard of? Yes, yes I think we are. Also now we can start assembling the downstairs kitchen. Which would be lovely. I would very much enjoy having a second kitchen since when everyone is in the one upstairs at the same time it's just a bit crowded. (okay, I lie, it's a lot crowded).

Got my mom a Roku player so that she can fully enjoy netflix on the upstairs TV. It seems to work very well, though I can't say I've done much more than browse through the interface so that I can answer any of her questions about it. I also made her watch all of the Pirates of the Carribbean movies last week since she hadn't seen any of them. She continuously asked me when Keith Richards was going to show up. I continuously went on about how Stellan Skarsgard is the father of my favorite actor (Alex Skarsgard, so dreamy, **swoon**), so I guess we're even. Next week we are starting Sherlock. The BBC reboot of it. Because I think my mother would appreciate it. And Benedict Cumberbatch is kind of AMAZING.

I helped my sister take her two new kitties to the vet this week. They are adorable and I loves them like a good auntie. Tomorrow I will come into town early and get them some shiny new toys! Their names are Callie and Calvin. They got them from the same lady they got Whiskey from for the price of a massage. The woman found Callie and her brother (who is still looking for a good home) on the side of the road while she was doing her paper route, they were starving and trying to eat anything that came within reach of them. Callie has an awful upper respiratory infection that is now getting slowly better with some antibiotics. She is going to be absolutely gorgeous once she feels better. She's long haired and dark gray with a white patch on her chest and a little white on her face. Almost looks like a dark gray tuxedo cat. She's also a snuggler, clearly mommy's little girl. She's also going to stay pretty small. Calvin is a boy and is a medium haired ragdoll. He's got dark brown dusky kind of points and is cream colored all over with light blue eyes. So pretty. Also he's kind of dumb, or maybe not dumb, but incredibly silly. And kind of macho. Like "You can't jump that high? Oh, I can totally jump that high, watch me. Oh, I missed it. Let me try over and over and over." He's kind of got a prominent brow. I like to call him cave man cat. He's on the antibiotics too, cuz he was sneezing quite a bit and probably just getting over the respiratory thing. He also has ear mites like no ones business. So my dear sister will have to revolution them next week. Because she already advantaged them for the fleas and the vet said she had to wait at least 7-10 days before she revolutioned them for the ear mites (and revolution also takes care of some types of worms).

So, that's the update on how my week has been. I can't think of anything else that I need to include. Have a wonderful day internets. Be good to each other (which I almost typed as 'Be food to each other' and really it works either way).

The dog days are over

So, though the first few days of the year were great on Monday it totally crashed and burned.

How it went down: I had e-mailed my boss that I wasn't sure what my schedule was because me and a co-worker were supposed to switch and he had never changed it. I told him I would be working what the computer reflected unless he texted me before 2pm on the day of. I need to know by 2pm because I need to leave around then to get to work by 3pm. It's commonly known that everyone in our office lives on their e-mail. I didn't think this would be a problem. I thought I could text him, but I didn't want to interrupt his weekend. I also might have been a touch passive aggressive because I get sick of him getting away with things that would never fly. I hate double standards.

At 3:07 I get a text telling me that I have to work...at 3:00. Clearly, there is absolutely no way that I can be to work at 3pm when it's already almost 10 minutes after. I was, needless to say, just a bit angry. I told him that wasn't going to fly for me. He responded that if that was the case then there would be no more changing of schedules. Which is kind of a horrible scare tactic if I've ever heard one. I told him that was fine. I'm not switching schedules for me, I'm switching schedules to make going to school easier on my co-worker. Because clearly I am far too flexible.

Then he called both of our boss and she called me and told me that I had to get to work and attempted to pass the whole thing off as somehow my fault because I hadn't cc'd her any of the e-mails. How does it end up all my fault when I'm just trying to help a co-worker with school? I have no idea. I told them I would be at work at 5pm and that this would not count as sick time. I ended up getting there a little after 4:30. I have never been so frustrated with a job that I felt like I was going to cry. I feel like I desperately need to get out of there.

The icing on top of this delicious piece of cake day was my sister texting me at about 6:15 that her cat Whiskey had been hit by a car and was no more. Instantly this sent me into hysterics and I cried off and on for probably the next 3 hours. And really, that's what you want to do when you have a job that includes talking to people on phone who ask you if you've suddenly developed a horrible cold. A very nice RN saw my distress and went and got me tissues. Thank goodness work has some lovely people or I would never survive. Alas none of them seem to be among my higher ups.

The cherry on top of the night was that at about 9:30pm the computer system that we use to do all of our work on decided to stop working. IT, whom I have to call when that happens, has no idea how our system works and has to forward it to people who are on-call. They usually don't have any idea what's going on either. So, I couldn't completely finish any of my work and had to leave it to my relief to figure out how to explain to the people how to get it working again. I imagine it was a server issue because it was 10 days previously when it happened to me the first time. There was no way I was staying a minute past when I was able to go.

That was the beginning of my week. Clearly this made me want to go to work the rest of the week. My poor sister was depressed and then her husband was on night shift this week so I spent a lot of time over there after work watching movies. But it pretty much made me feel like a terribly failure all week.

I got to see a friend who lives down in California and meet his lovely wife for the first time, so that was a bright spot. It's nice to talk to him. He writes music basically as a ghost writer for a much more well known composer. We talked about some of the projects that he's worked on and what he's been working on since I saw him last (apparently all the music in the game Epic Mickey is his) and talked about the excitement of living in downtown LA compared to the quietness of Lynden. It was a nice chat, and I got a delicious red velvet cupcake out of it as well.

Saturday was Nate's house warming party. A few friends and I car-pooled down to Seattle to see his place in Fremont. It's an adorable little place. Just about the perfect size for one person, kind of a classy bachelor pad. We all got there about 3pm because we decided we'd spend the whole day down there since we were coming from Lynden. We walked around Fremont and went and saw the troll, took some pics and then walked around. There's a giant statue of Lenin that you can buy for $150,000. We played a game of Balderdash were my dyslexia kicked in epically. AGH! Because that made me feel so good about myself after the week that I had already been exposed to.

Other people came over and we ate and chatted and drank and then played some mafia. Mafia is a good game when everyone isn't too drunk and you have a manageable amount of people. This was not the case by the second game of mafia. Narrated by my cousin who picked possibly the most emotionally painful way to off me when I was killed by the mafia. Not that he could have known at that point. But I almost started crying which totally caused me to be horribly embarassed. Meanwhile people keep getting louder and louder because they are getting more and more drunk and I'm in no fit mood to be around people at this point. Also, biggest flirt in the world guy who has a girlfriend (who isn't there) is getting hit on by someone who is EPICALLY annoying when drunk and that was pissing me off because she felt the need to shout everything. I should have gone and taken a walk. Blegh!

We left about an hour later and had an exciting drive home through snow in Everett to Marysville and then once again when we hit Alger. It was certainly some exciting times. Though I think I might have slept a bit.

I went home and went almost directly to bed. I felt as though I had a little too much exposure to people yesterday. Sometimes I can handle it, but this week has been so full of high emotion that I just don't think it was a good idea to expose myself to that many people. Oh well, it was fun. Mostly.

Next week will be a better week and work is just work and it will be fine. Work is not my life. I've got a nice little lunch to go to on Tuesday and everything will be excellent. And then Hawai'i at the end of February. Looking forward to that. Really, really looking forward to it.

That's about all I have to say. It feels good to get that all out of my system. Starting fresh.

Map of Tasmania

So, here's the first post of the year: the sober edition.

New year's was really great however and everyone's costumes were super. Brent's Charlie Chaplin will go down in history as the best Charlie Chaplin outfit ever. At least before he took off the mustache.

I think I pulled a muscle in my left thigh while dancing. Which is the most ridiculous thing I can think of. Also my abs hurt. I must have been dancing like a crazy person. Well, no, I was dancing with the biggest tease in the whole world. We won't go there. Stupid tease. He has a girlfriend! Tease and a flirt...grrrr...but on the whole a friendly kind of grrr, because I do need the practice.

This year will be a good one. I can feel it in my bones. I know that it will have it's ups and downs, but it seems like the downs won't be quite so bad at this point. I've got lots of fun and excitement planned and I'm totally ready for it. Hawai'i at the end of February, beginning of March and then hopefully comic-con in July, and then Chicago for my cousin's wedding in August. I'm totally ready for all of it. And to continue with my weight loss adventure. I'm roughly 5-6 lbs away from my goal for the end of February, and I know that I can totally make it. I'd like to get better about exercising more frequently. That's a big goal for this year. Though not a resolution because I just don't like being resolute about things.

I'm kind of sick of working in the position that I have as well, so maybe I'll keep my eye open for something new and far more exciting than this one. Or at least I'll keep it in mind. It is comfortable here, and the pay is alright (though no where near decent). But it's a thought for sure.

Amanda Palmer is supposedly going to be in Seattle sometime in November. So I'm definitely keeping an eye out for that and planning on dragging everyone to it that I possibly can because she's so fantabulous. I hope she brings Brian...I can practice my flirting on him too **wiggly eyebrows**

I think that's all I have left to sum up. One word of advice: If my sister offers you punch...you better bet your ass she put rum in it.

P-p-p-p-poker face

New Year's was great. Everyone did very well on the 1920s garb, though it is probably best I am writing this slightly inebriated. I need to get this make up off and head to breakfast in the AM. I can't imagine having spent it with a better group of people, minus a few bright shining faces. Audrey's brother was Charlie Chaplin and he was totally spot on. It was great. I even danced with a boy...who has a girlfriend, but I'll take what I can get...there were many single girls there who I am sure were not as fortunate as I to have wonderful friends.

Here's hoping this year is bright and shiny and while it's still new I think it is the best year ever...

Happy first post of the year blog