Selfish jerks!
Dear jerks I work with,
If you expect me to drop everything to help you with something, then you better damn well be prepared to return the favor.
Die in a fire,
Me
Keys and computers
Thar be keys in mah door!
Hmm. Don’t got the keys. They’re not on the counter, not on the table, and not on the desk. That’s kind of odd since I only ever put them in one of those three spots.
Just because it was early and I could barely see, I checked all those spots again. Nope, no keys! I just stood there for a minute thinking about where I might have left them when a thought suddenly struck. I slowly turned, looking at the front door to my apartment. The deadbolt has a knob on the inside, not a keyhole, so no keys there… but there’s a keyhole on the outside.
I went to the door, opened it, and guess what I found? Anyone?
/facepalm
Saturday morning I got a call from my mom. Well, technically my mom left a voicemail - there was no way I was gonna get up to answer the phone at 10am on a Saturday. Apparently my grandmother’s computer was having some kind of problem accessing the internet, and she asked if I could go over there to fix it.
Now, this touches on an issue that’s rather prominent in my life - displaying any kind of computer skill will automatically make you a computer technician, for free, for your extended family. It’s just like that uncle you have that knows how to fix cars; everyone goes to him with all their problems. Normally I get a bit resentful when I get volunteered like that. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem helping people - it’s just that being told to help someone without being given the choice is somewhat different, and usually rubs me the wrong way. It doesn’t help that it came from my parents, either. My mom is pretty computer proficient, but my dad will call me every time the email has a problem.
I’m dangerously close to going off on a tangent, so let’s get this back to my grandmother. I figure yeah, what the hell, I can go look at her computer, and Sunday afternoon I drove across town (well okay, not across town, but it’s a good 20-30 minute drive) to see what I could do. She fired up the laptop, showed me what she usually did to connect, sure enough it didn’t work. Luckily the problem was easily fixed, only requiring a trip back to the apartment to download a software update she needed. (She uses dialup - I wasn’t gonna hang around for three hours.)
After I got the computer fixed, she gave me some cake - oh, so very yummy cake. Triple layer carrot cake/cheesecake/carrot cake, and all slathered with cream cheese frosting. It was just absolutely delightful. And of course we talked while we ate the cake. She told me about her eye surgery (they’re correcting her vision to be damn near 20/20 o.o), her upcoming birthday, and just all the little family stuff that I never really hear from my parents.* All in all, I think it was a really great visit, and she was thrilled to see me, and pleased to have her email back. I had to stifle a laugh when she was telling me how - before I fixed it - she never used it anyway, and she’d rather use the phone, and she was about ready to just cancel the service… but then she gave a little cheer and hugged me when I got it going.
*Footnote, just because I didn’t want to interrupt the previous paragraph. My parents never tell me anything. My cousins that I thought only had four kids? Pregnant with their sixth. My other cousin who lives in New York? Comes back to Jacksonville this week. My uncle retires in a month. Looks like I need more computers to break just so I can keep tabs on everything that is going on.
Tags: apartment, familyThe ladybug picnic
One of my jobs at work is loading blank tapes into the backup server. They just happened to be stacked in groups of three, so I was counting “1,2,3 - 4,5,6″, and so on.
I got to 12 and out of nowhere my brain finishes up “12 ladybugs, at the ladybug picnic.”
I tell ya, I never fail to be amazed by some of the stuff my brain digs up.
Life is a highway…
We have a little web-based time clock here that all the hourly employees have to use (*grumble mutter*). It’s slow as hell, and kind of a pain, but one of the few useful things it can do is keep track of sick, personal, and vacation time.
I’d never really looked at the totals before today. I mean, I know I have vacation time - it’s just a matter of getting everything here at work set so I can actually use it. This morning I was somewhat curious though, so I flipped over to the tab to see what the numbers said.
*sigh* And trying to open it up just now for the exact numbers, it made my other computer seize up completely. These people shouldn’t be making software, they should be making automotive brakes.
Anywho. I have some carryover vacation from last year (which is technically not company policy, but my boss pulled a string with HR), and some comp days from working a holiday or two. With that added to my normal vacation time, I have 15 paid days off.
I could just up and disappear for three weeks. This is made further appealing by the fact that Jess doesn’t have a job, which makes it FAR easier to coordinate.
Three weeks. I love road trips - I wonder where we should head off to?
Tags: VacationEvery summer afternoon
I went to lunch ealier and it was blazing hot outside, no clouds, high humidity - like 95 degrees. Less than an hour later and there’s a really strong thunderstorm.
Gotta love Florida weather.
It’s like this every day, really. I still have a fully loaded car from stuff I was moving out of my parents’ house that a storm prevented me from unloading. The same storm also started a fire in a neighborhood just down the road from my parents via lightning strike.
Tags: Florida, weatherA foghorn, perhaps?
Lately I’ve been having trouble falling asleep at night. Doesn’t matter what time I lay down, I almost never fall asleep before midnight, and lately it’s been closer to 1 or 2 in the morning before I finally drift off to sleep. Getting up, as one might guess from the lack of sleep, is also something that’s becoming progressively more difficult to do.
It’s particularly annoying when something really soft such as my computer randomly turning on at 3 in the morning (okay, seriously, wtf? I have no idea why it did that. It wasn’t even the beep that woke me, just the soft whrrrrrrr of the fans coming on) will immediately snap me out of slumber, yet I’ll sleep through a very obnoxious and loud alarm for an hour and a half.
So last night I thought to myself “Self, I’m pooped. Let’s go to bed early.” Martial arts class was skipped, an early dinner was eaten, and I was in bed by 8 pm, looking forward to a glorious 9 hours of sleep. To my surprise I woke up before the alarm went off. I sat up in bed, and as my brain slowly kicked into gear I realized I didn’t feel like I had slept for 9 hours. In fact, I was still really tired and groggy. I scraped enough sleep from my eyes to be able to focus on the clock, then blinked dumbly for a moment at the time.
12:03. *sigh*
It was 2:30 before I was able to fall asleep again, and I still have absolutely no idea what woke me up.
Oh, and I slept through the alarm again. >.<
Tags: sleepltrs r imprtnt
One of the quirks about Jacksonville (and I really imagine it’s not just our city, but I haven’t been in enough to compare properly) is that no matter where you begin or end a road trip, you will drive through at least one area where the road is under construction. I may have a slightly skewed perspective on this since the road immediately outside of my apartment is being gutted and expanded to four lanes, but for the moment we’ll pretend that doesn’t matter. >.>
One particular highway that lies between my apartment and work is also in the midst of some massive roadwork - flyovers being built, new medians, drainage areas, just tons of work. There’s cranes swinging in the air over the road, bright work lights (It’s still not entirely light when I go to work), and dump trucks racing to and fro with loads of dirt. Because the drivers in Florida aren’t always particularly aware of what’s going on around them, the state has large programmable signs that flash text messages.
TRUCKS ENTERING AND
LEAVING HIGHWAY USE
CAUTION
There’s one specific sign that’s right next to the on-ramp that I use every morning that sends, at least to me, a slightly different message. Instead of TRUCKS, it just says TRUCK, which makes me giggle every time I drive past it and envision a single dump truck swerving on and off the roadway, slaloming around those little orange barrels.
Letters are important!
In WoW there is booze. Booze gets you drunk, and drunk makes you slur your speech - the game will randomly take the letter ’s’ in words and change it to an ’sh’, as well as adding ‘…hic!’ to the ends of sentences. Sometimes it tweaks words in amusing ways, like the following emote we saw one night at a group RP session.
Zhalen shits with a huge thud.
Be kind to your letters, or they will totally sabotage the meaning of your sentences. 
Need legos, stat!
This is gonna sound really weird, and may not make a lot of sense… but I can’t really think of any different way to phrase it.
I feel like more of an adult today than I did yesterday. It’s nothing specific that happened, just… I dunno. A realization, maybe? I mean, I’m 27, but I can honestly say I’ve never really felt that old.
Maybe this is what growing up feels like? It’s weird. I’m not sure I like it.
Yikes!
I just realized I have no links at all on here!
Edit: Fixed! If I missed you, please yell and let me know.
/lazy
Man, this weekend just flew by.
Thursday Jess and I headed down to Disney to make use of the last day of our four-day passes. Our destination: Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Since the park was open until 8 (and honestly, DAK isn’t that large of a park) we didn’t leave the apartment until 10 or so, arriving at the park right around one.
I made Jess go down the slides in The Boneyard where I used to work. She didn’t seem entirely thrilled about having to do it, but she got me back by getting me soaked on the water ride.
It was a pretty fun day, though! We hit all the major stuff we wanted to, had some pretty yummy food, and made it back home around 11 pm or so.
Friday (Happy explosion day!) we met David, Alice, Brandon, and Jessica - who I will try to consistently refer to here as Jessica so as to avoid confusion with Jess - at the Orange Park Mall. After a yummy lunch in the mall’s food court, we all trekked over to the theater to see Get Smart. The movie was surprisingly good!
Jess and I hung out for a bit that evening, and then I went back to the apartment and listened to things blow up in the area… until 2 AM.
Saturday we hijacked Jess’ mom’s truck and helped move a desk into my parents’ house that my boss happened to be ditching. Also worked on packing up what little bit of stuff I still have left at my parents’ house - now it’s just all in various boxes that are scattered around my apartment.
You’ll probably notice that I did a fair bit of driving throughout the weekend so far - Disney is probably about a 300 mile round trip, and the other two days I drove at least 50 miles. Not so Sunday! I didn’t get up until sometime after 10-11, and I didn’t get out of bed until after 1. It was nice to just lay there half-awake for a while, then pull the laptop over and fuss around with it a bit. Other than some laundry and an interesting attempt at cooking eggs and bacon, it was a fairly lazy day. I almost got away with not having to drive anywhere at all except for a trip to Jess’ house. I definitely love going over there, but ugh - sometimes I just really, really don’t feel like driving. Anywhere.
Now that the weekend is over (I still can’t believe all four days have already come and gone), I have to get busy finishing moving in to the apartment. I’m having people over for dinner Friday!
Tags: Disney, lazy, this girl I love, Travel