.._. ._.. .. _... _... .. _.. _.. _.__ .___ .. _... _... .. _ ..__..

The sistercreature has returned to her regularly scheduled habitat. She didn’t say goodbye. Should I be bothered? I’m not particularly, but I feel like I should be.

_ …. .. …   .. …   ._   …. ___ ._. .. __..___ _. _ ._ ._..   ._.. .. _…_._._

Around 2am, I realized I was frakkin hungry and needed actual dinner, but I was sick of the same 4 leftover stew-type substances I’ve been living off the plast* few weeks, so I went scavenging for something different.

I found some frozen meatballs which looked tasty, and a thing leftover macaroni and cheese, which turned out to be the gross pre-packaged overly-creamy-but-completely-devoid-of-flavor kind, but I already had it warmed up, so I dumped some salsa on it and ate it with the meatballs as a slightly bizarre but inoffensive approximation of pasta.

*Plast = when my brain combines “past” and “last” and likes it that way cause they mean the same thing in this context.

_ …. .. …   .. …   __ ___ ._. … .   _._. ___ _.. . __..__   _… .._ _ _.__ ___ .._   _._ _. ___ .__ ._._._

Why is my room so freezy? Bedtime, yes?

Snow Safari! (or something.)

I ventured out into the world today, for the first time since… Tuesday night? Not that the snow was keeping me in, just didn’t have anywhere to go Wednesday-Saturday. (I don’t actually have a life, Job #1 is still in temporary schedule limbo, and Job #2 is portable.)

Most of the roads in the area are totally fine now, but my neighborhood is kind of the Bermuda Triangle, (it’s nearly impossible to find where you’re looking for, geometry and physics don’t apply, and if you end up there accidentally you may never find your way out,) so unsurprisingly, my street and the ones it connects to haven’t been properly plowed since the snow finished snowing.

Now, the plow passed by my window several times during the snow, and at least two of those was actually plowing, but they appear to have given up several inches too soon.

So, you’ve got the small continuous mounds of snow edging into the average-bordering-on-narrow street along the curb, from people shoveling their stretches of sidewalk, plus the sporadically spaced giant snow mountains of what the trucks did plow, just kind of chillin there (pun unintended but admitted, unashamed), and then all the cars that park in the street wedged in wherever they can, as close to the now-merely-theoretical curb as the snow mounds/mountains will permit, resulting in a veritable one-lane maze.

But alas, recall those last few inches of snow that snowed since the snowplow stopped plowing? Yeah, they’re still on the road. Of course, people have been driving over them for a few days, so some spots have melted down to the road and since dried up, some melted but then re-froze into nice slippy bits, others are packed down hard into solid bumps, and then there’s the spots that aren’t quite sure, so you drive up on them and then they decide they’re slippy or slushy…

So you’re bump-crunch-slip-slosh-sliding down the road, weaving between snow mountains and parked cars and not-parked cars coming from the other way and the occasional pedestrian, while trying not to slow down too much, because if you lose momentum on the wrong stretch, you might end up parked there til spring… and it’s awesome. :D Like off-roading, but on the road. Very entertaining.

I like your moxie, sassafras.

As per a friend's excellent recommendation, the current marathon is Pushing Daisies.

Oh.

My.

Goodness.

Well done, friend. I'm hooked. The characters are brilliant, the plots are entertaining, the dialog is witty as all get out, and occasionally, they sing! It's all so quirky and wonderful and cartoonish. :D

And, as per usual, I've fallen for the main character, Ned the pie maker. He's so adorkable. Him and Chuck the alive-again-dead-girl are so cute together.

Ironically, he reminds me of another Chuck, of the more typical male variety, Chuck Bartowski. Something about the tall, caring, funny, slightly awkward, average sort of guy with a special talent he's not quite sure what to do with, and a smile that turns me into a pile of goo on the floor.

Ambifluous.

Yep, ambifluous. I was looking for a word to describe this state of mind, but that's all I came up with. And it's not actually a word. I guess it's somewhere in between "ambivalent" and "superfluous", which doesn't quite peg it, but it's not the worst approximation... there's always "purple"... or... "Scandanavian." Those are slightly less accurate.

There is an element of ambivalence, and an element of superfluousness, (superfluouitity? pretty sure that's not a word either, and definitely a misspelled non-word,) but there's something else in there too, that I can't quite name.

A lack of direction, maybe. Focus. Both as a noun and a verb. Something to focus on, and the ability to focus. I need a goal, a passion, something to aim for, to look forward to (besides warmer weather). What do I want?

SNOWF.

The sistercreature is home. J-term break. I somehow thought it was already the normal spring semester, while having no idea January was that close to over. Total surprise. I was just standing in the kitchen, minding my own business, looking for lunch at 3pm, and all the sudden the door made sounds and there she was. >.< The house seems so much more crowded when she's here.

Also, snow. And a fair bit of it too. It'll be all the more crowded, because nobody's going anywhere any time soon. It's pretty though, and much nicer to be snowed in at home than at school.

Wouldn't think snow days would do me any good, since I'm not scheduled at Job #1 at all and I work wherever whenever for Job #2... but then the power went out for like 30 seconds, and the cable/internet went out for a few hours (the reasonable ones, when I would have actually done work). Pretty much all my work is internet-based and mostly stored in Google Docs, so I was able to pull the text from the few things I had open already and finish those offline, but there's only so much I could get at without internet access, so I got a "snow day" for a little while after all. It's back now though, obviously, so I'll probably have to attempt productivity tomorrow.

My phone is internety, but not in such a way that I could really accomplish anything with it, and both actual tv and tv-via-interwebs were kaputt, so I decided to actually read, for the first time in too long. I had a random murder mystery lying around from... well that's slightly funny:

Job #1 = bookstore, recall? Back when I was noobish and the world had reasonable temperatures, I was in there on one of my days off with the mama, trying to ask one of the managers a question, but there was this author in there finishing up a signing of sorts... looked to be done and packing up, but she was talking to the manager I was waiting to talk to, and somehow between the two of them, misinterpreted my lurking as waiting for her, so I felt awkward and when she asked if I wanted her to sign a book for me I said sure...

...So I had this random murder mystery from this random local author lady, and an unexpected chunk of time to kill, so I read it. All of it. In like, 4ish hours, I think.

It was pretty good... kind of dissatisfying for a while, as there was a long stretch in the later middle where not much was revealed so trying to figure it out was hopeless and frustrating, but in the end, things came together well enough. I could tell it was her first novel, but it was an enjoyable quick read overall, and the obligatory romantic sub-plot was believable and quite cute.

It felt really good to be able to read for fun again, (I played guitar last night too! It's like I'm a person again!) and moreover 'twas quite reassuring to discover that I could still read fairly quickly. After 4 years of mostly horrendous college reading, some failed attempts at reading business books/articles, and a few months in the cubecicle, I was afraid my brain had gone to mush. Maybe I'll go do math now. D:

An Interesting Contrast

I fall for fictional characters like it's my job.

It seems every show I watch and love, I fall for the leading man. (Or sometimes not the leading man, but at least one of the guys in the main cast.) Maybe it's just that I like shows more when they have some fine specimen of manliness for me to crush on. Probably both. We all know I'm a sucker. :P

Right now I'm watching through Torchwood and drooling over Captain Jack Harkness. Before this I was catch-up-marathon-ing Bones, and slightly in love with Agent Seely Booth. Clearly there's something about dashing hero types with government backing but a cowboy attitude, but beyond that, those two are rather different.

Booth is completely transparent and loyal to his country and his friends. Jack, on the other hand, is a bit of an enigma, and we're never quite sure exactly where his loyalties lie (so far... maybe it becomes clearer later). Booth seems to mostly have and follow a similar sense of right and wrong as I do, while Jack is apparently a reformed con-man who follows a different moral code and I don't quite understand what his values are. Booth is an old-fashioned one girl [at a time] kind of guy and ultimately in love with Brennan, Jack is... shall we say, indiscriminant, as far as I can tell. Booth is pretty close to perfect, Jack is gorgeous and funny and often infuriating, and they're both irresistible... and fictional. (Details, details.)

My life happens in approximately 3-month chunks.

Ah, at last, I'm down to just 2 jobs again. The contract at Job #3 ended a little earlier than expected. It was supposed to last 3 months, then I could potentially be hired permanently, or it could be extended, or it could just be done. Since I held onto Jobs #1 and #2 all this time, and the three altogether didn't leave much time for anything else, all I really wanted was a decision, ,and thankfully, that's what I got.

On one hand it's obviously disappointing not to come out of it with a permanent full-time job with benefits, decent money, and friendly coworkers, but on the other, it's quite nice not to have to drive an hour each way to do a pretty mundane job (the work wasn't bad, but not something I wanted to do for too long), and finally have time to focus on the other jobs, catch up with friends and tv shows, and still have time to sleep. So all said and done, it averages out to indifference, roughly.

A thought, absurd.

My dog likes to hang out in the bathroom, and occasionally takes a dump on the living room rug. I tell him he's mixed up his sitting places with his shitting places, but he's a dog, so he doesn't get it.

Reacquaintances

The bookstore is in the same town I went through school in, so bumping into people I knew in high school is a pretty frequent occurrence.

Tonight, as I was working there, a guy came up to ask me to help him find a book, and I was halfway through realizing he was kind of attractive, when we both simultaneously realized we knew each other.

It was a guy I graduated high school with... and actually he was in my first grade class too... We never really talked much in school, but we caught up briefly as I showed him the section he was looking for. He seemed nice. It was... surreal?

Back to "Real Life"

Work today was... work-ish. Mostly boring and cold and sleepy, occasionally amusing.

There's a pair of sisters at Job #3. The younger one got hired with me, and the older one is my cube-neighbor. I rarely see the younger one, and don't think I've had an actual (even brief) conversation with her in the 2+ months we've been working there, but every so often, she comes over to her sister's cube and I overhear a conversation between the two of them...

• First it makes me laugh.
• Then it makes me feel really intelligent/superior.
• Then I feel like an asshat for feeling superior.
• Then it just goes back to making me laugh.

It's not that they're morons, but they don't seem to be the sharpest crayons in the box either. Mostly, it's just that their experiences, priorities, and thought processes are so foreign to me... it's like an anthropological study. Haha.

Today, the one was telling the other about an app she found for her iProduct-of-choice... it was one of those harmonic brainwave-tuner things that uses different frequencies to affect your mood/mental state/whatever.

"...and it really works! I tried the calming one. I thought about something upsetting and listened to it, and felt better! And I put on the one that's supposed to put you to sleep, and I got really tired..."

Something about the way she said it... it was like "Aw, how quaint, she's trying to do science!" (Not quite as judgy as that sounds. Heck, she could be very intelligent, for all I know. But they are hilarious/fascinating to overhear.)

Day 2

2011 has, thus far, continued its trend of not completely sucking. And I am [technically] keeping up with my tentative resolution to blog every day, and thus the actual resolution to blog semi-regularly.

Small victory. \o/

Church was interesting today... they finally announced that a fairly significant* change is about to start happening. The possibility has been brewing, officially-though-quietly, for a couple years now. I smelled it coming a good deal sooner than that, but didn't realize it at the time. What is actually going to happen is yet to be determined, but things are officially set in motion now... so it will be interesting* to see what goes down in the coming months.

Entirely unrelatedly, I went to a wedding a few days ago. On Wednesday. It was a decidedly odd time for a wedding, and slightly inconvenient, being smack in the middle of the holiday week (though not according to Job #3...), but was a lovely celebration and a good excuse to take a couple days off and actually have a little time to enjoy the holidays. Initially, I thought it was far enough away that I'd have to spend the night somewhere, so I requested Thursday off too, and then it turned out it was close enough that it was easier to just drive home afterwards, so I had a legit day off on Thursday, and Friday was the official holiday for New Years, so between those and the weekend I had a nice little mini-break. (Of course, I worked at Job #1 yesterday and scattered hours for Job #2 throughout, so I wasn't totally free, but at least I got to catch up on sleep a bit.)

Back to the normal unpleasant schedule tomorrow, bright-and-way-too-early.

* Understatement.

Happy New Year!

2011 is off to an interesting start.

I was invited to celebrate with friends in the city proper. My dad was driving the sister-creature in to the same area at about the same time I was planning to go, so I figured I may as well rife in with them, and catch a ride home with other friends I knew would be in attendance, who live near me. Great plan, except I somehow missed the memo that everyone was planning on spending the night. So, surprise sleepover. And I have to work tomorrow afternoon. (Job #1.)

But it's cool. I'll survive, and I adore these people. Twas a very fun evening. : D

I think my New Year's resolution will be to blog (for my own sanity, not just the job one) on a regular basis. And to spend time with God consistently. I'm bad at both of those. Maybe that can change this year.

Goodnight.

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In the Interim

Haha well, clearly that "blogging consistently" thing has worked so very well these last few months. Actually, no, scratch that, I have been blogging fairly consistently, just not for me or as me or on my own blog.

See, since I last posted here, I have somehow acquired two more jobs. Job #1, as you may recall, is peddling books and beverages.

Job #2 is another part time gig, basically transcribing and editing blog posts and other chunks of wordage for a marketing consultant. So I have been posting on a blog at least once a week, just not my blog, not my ideas, only half my words, and I get paid for it.

Job #3 is mainly adding bookmarks and links to PDFs (the company is a middleman for regulatory paperwork). It's full time, but only a contact position right now, so I can't quit the others (or even one of them) until I find out if they're keeping me beyond that.

So, for now, I'm in a strange sort of employment-limbo. Thankfully, 3-jobs-limbo includes three paychecks, but it also keeps me absurdly busy.

Thus, the lack of bloggery.

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