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:

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.

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.)