Posting multiple entries

Well, I'm finally online again. But I don't have enough time to bring everyone fully up to date (gotta catch my bus soon here). So I'll post as many as I can.



July 18, 2005

Ok, I haven’t written in eons, so I have a lot of stuff to talk about. Since I don’t have much time, I’m going to be as brief as possible.

I went to the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede for two days with the Boy. The first day we watched the marching show band competition. One of the bands was the Marching Koala’s who came all the way from Australia. Made me think of Hebby. Another band played a piece called Atomic Clock, which I of course spelled in my mind as “AtomiClock” and which made me think fondly of Atomic. :) Our drum corps, Allegiance Elite, came in 4th overall, which is pretty good considering it’s the very beginning of the drum corps season and the very end of the marching band season. AE didn’t even have the drill for their closing piece finished and they still kicked the butts of most of the marching bands! Go CORPS!

Anyway… The second day we had all day midway ride passes, so we spent many hours on rides getting sunburned. It was a blast. We also watched the Superdogs, (a great show that’s kinda like Broadway meets Agility Tests), went to the Chuckwagon races and the Grandstand Show, (which was celebrating Alberta’s centennial, with lots of singing and dancing and a stand-up comedian and acrobats from Cirque du Soleil) and then saw the fireworks. Ah, the Stampede! If it weren’t for the 300,000 tourists, it would be awesome!

We also spent $60.00 buying 15 different flavours of fudge to take home and try, and spent $40.00 on a balsa wood dragon kite from Indonesia. I can’t WAIT to fly that kite! It’s all hand painted (red), and looks soooo cool! Sadly, we haven’t had a chance to take it out yet.

Work news: The co-worker at Virgin that I didn’t get along with has handed in her resignation. Yay! I can’t say that I’m sad to see her go. At Fan Attic I found out that my manager has bi-polar disorder (aka, manic depression), and we spent hours talking about depression with this girl from the store next door to ours. It was really cool! Oh, and both my manager and the other girl think I’m really smart. (People always seem to think so. One of my mom’s co-workers apparently walks past where I’m working in hopes that my intelligence will rub off on her. Creepy. These people don’t even know me that well! But they say that you can “just tell from talking” to me.) * Shrugs *

I told Colin about how upset I was the day that I moved in. He felt really bad about it, not that it was his fault at all. Then the next day he single-handedly cleaned the entire basement and removed the cat-urine soaked couch so that my stuff won’t pick up the smell. God, I love that boy.

I took Karma to the vet for his shots. Turns out he’s a he, not a she! I never bothered checking because my roommates have been right about the sex of all the other cats! Oh, well. But I did feel silly not knowing. I also bought him a cat carrier with a soft little bed inside of it, and some brushes for his long fur.
The other Kittens are slowly getting over their bout with URV. Their eyes are vastly improved, though they still look silly running around with little cones on their heads. We refer to them fondly as our little satellite dishes. LOL. I love being both a cat toy and a cat bed for 6 kitties. It makes me feel so calm and peaceful. * sigh * My other roommates seem to get annoyed with being treated like a personal cat toy/bed, but I love it. After all, why else do we have the cats?

The Boy and I went camping and singing in Drumheller one weekend. It was great. We managed to put up this huge 11-man tent with 4 rooms that we borrowed from Colin’s brother, ate steak and hamburgers and chicken breasts cooked over an open fire, hiked around, visited the Royal Tyrell Museum (dinosaur capital of the world!), took 4 rolls of pictures and sang in the Canadian Badlands Passion Play. Good times had by all. I’ll have to post my pics somewhere when my computer works again. (It IS a desert, gosh darn it, Selroth!)

What else? Oh, yes, I bought and read the 6th Harry Potter book. Excellent stuff! Far better than the 5th book, in my opinion. We’ve also ordered the internet, (finally), but the very next day half the people who work at our ISP went on strike. D’oh! So now we wait to see what happens. We went out and bought a router though. Yay!





Saturday, July 23, 2005

(9:43 am)

I am such an idiot. I knew that I was working a double shift today, but I’m so used to starting work at 1:45 on Saturdays that I didn’t really think about it. So I stayed up watching M*A*S*H episodes with my roommates until 4:00 in the morning when I finally realized that I had to be at work by 8:00 am. Therefore, I only had about 3 hours of sleep and had to take a cab to work. (If I’d taken the bus I would have only had a maximum of 2 hours of sleep.) And this is a double shift day, so I’m not going to get off work until 9:30 pm, and won’t get home until about 10:45 – 11:00 pm! I’m going to be soooo tired! Ah, well. It’s my own damn fault.

Since I’m working at Fan Attic this morning, and our store has been really slow lately, I am allowed to just sit here and either read or write or otherwise entertain myself. I’ve already re-folded a bunch of the shirts because they were really messy and it was driving me crazy to look at them. But I’m taking a bit of a break now to write this.

As I said, we are allowed to just sit here and slack off; however, one thing we are NOT supposed to do is go on the internet.

They just had DSL installed on our store computer (used to be dial-up), but we are not supposed to use it. Even though my manager is always surfing on her shifts. (I know, because I’ve been working while she does it.) It’s so tempting to just check my email and look at the forums quickly. And I know for a fact that some of the other employees have used the net before. But I am trying to resist temptation. I don’t want to get caught using the internet, especially after a direct reminder from my manager not to. And I know myself. If I use it once, it’ll just become easier and easier to use it again.

Confession time. Much as we all like to joke about being addicted to the internet, I think I really do have a bit of a problem with it. I mean, it’s not the be all and end all of my existence, but I think it has become too important to me and it does tend to distract me from more important things that I should be doing.

Like working. To tell the truth, part of the reason I lost my full time job at the insurance company (almost a year ago now), is because I used to surf the net at work, even after repeated warnings not to. Unfortunately, I also needed internet access to do my job, so it couldn’t be taken off my computer. I also used to work on my own projects on company time.

Quite honestly, I deserved to be fired, and I know it. I have justification for what I did (aren’t we all experts at justifying our own behavior?), but I know that there isn’t any excuse. It’s true that I was depressed to the point that I was frequently in tears on the way to work or at my desk; that forcing myself to get up in the morning was increasingly difficult; that I was no longer challenged by my work and felt stuck in a dead-end job with a small company that refused to send me for any further training; that I was being treated poorly by the acting manager and that I had pretty much just stopped caring about my job. I hated being at work and was horribly unhappy. I was distracting myself with the internet. However, what I was doing was wrong, and I deserved what I got. In fact, they should have let me go long before they did.

Although… I would like to point out two more things. Firstly, I didn’t have any other access to the net at the time, so the temptation to surf at work was that much greater. Secondly, when I was given the responsibility of designing a new database in MS Access for all our insurance data I threw myself into the project and didn’t even consider surfing the net. My mind was so full of data and equations and relationships and ideas about how to make things work that I frequently worked through coffee and lunch breaks. I was inspired. And I was GOOD at it, gosh darn it! I had a natural sort of knack for it (if I do say so myself) that caused several of my co-workers to ask me if I had ever considered getting into computer programming. But then our acting manager killed my project, just as it was about ready to go live. Suddenly the most interesting (or, rather, the ONLY interesting) thing about my job was gone. Instead I found myself in a restructured department with only one other person (who was out on the road 4 out of 5 days a week), with a vastly reduced job description doing nothing but repetitive data entry. It was tortuous, mind numbing, and very de-motivating so I went back to doing a lot of surfing and being very unproductive.

Anyway, the point of this digression is that I need to be careful and exercise self-control regarding using the internet at work. Checking my email or the forums is not worth losing my job over, especially when I should be getting the net at home again soon.





Tuesday, July 26, 2005

(1:43 pm)

I had a flying dream last night. But it wasn’t one of my normal flying dreams; this one was very different from the ones I’ve had before. In this dream I was somewhere in downtown Calgary. I was leaving one of the buildings, (I don’t remember which one or what I was doing there), and I was trying to get home to the house I live in now. I’m pretty sure I was in my dragon form, since I was four legged and winged, but it felt so normal for me to be in that form that I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

Anyway, I needed to fly home, but there were all these tall buildings and power lines and things in my way, so I figured it would be easier and safer to just fly over everything. I took off and flew higher and higher trying to get above all the buildings and especially above the powerlines. (After all, it would really hurt to fly into them!) But there were these really tall electrical towers everywhere, so no matter how high I flew I was surrounded by this web of powerlines. Finally I was so high above the ground that I was starting to wonder how they had managed to install all these powerlines and think that it would have been easier to just run the electrical cables up the towers, rather than between them. I remember that I was so high up that I told myself not to look down because I was worried that I’d get scared and fall, but of course, as soon as I thought that I looked down anyway and although I was indeed very high in the air I didn’t fall out of the sky. (Silly thought really. Why would my wings stop working just because I’d looked down? Must’ve been the human part of me invading my dream.)

Here’s where the order of events gets a little confused, but this is how I think things went. Eventually I was so high in the air that I couldn’t make out any features on the ground and I realized that there wasn’t much point in trying to fly higher because I was just going to get lost. So I started circling and descending while looking for a way through the powerlines. Suddenly I noticed what looked like a line of spaceships and flying robot-things flying toward me. At first I thought they might be dangerous, but they just started flying past me. I noticed what looked like a little creature stuck underneath something on the outside of one of the ship/robot things. I somehow freed the creature and discovered that it was a baby robot. It thanked me for freeing it, then the ship thanked me too. I turned around and saw a second trapped baby robot so I freed that one as well. Then I just left the baby robots attached to the mother ship (literally) – I think they held on with magnets or something – and flew off.

I continued my spiral descent, still avoiding the powerlines, when somehow I was unexpectedly captured by something. (That part of the dream is pretty vague.) I ended up in a ship, bound to some sort of chair thing. (Perhaps I was in human form at this point, but I don’t recall changing forms.) There was some kind of evil scientist/villain/enemy there who said something about already having my memories but needing to get more of them (?) and he put a device on my head that began sucking images out of my mind. It was a very painful process and my dream dissolved into a chaotic whirlwind of images. I don’t remember anything after that.

(3:55 pm)

In other news… I took Karma to the vet today before work so that he can be neutered. His surgery was scheduled for 3:00 pm, and it’s a fairly simple procedure, so it should be finished by now. …I wonder if they’ve called me… Nope, no messages, so everything must’ve gone well.

My poor baby kitty! Locked in the bathroom all by himself all night because he wasn’t allowed to eat for at least 12 hours before his surgery, then stuffed into a cat carrier, dragged across town on a loud, scary bus and then left with strangers at a scary, smelly clinic with people poking and prodding at him and sticking needles and tubes into his legs and down his throat and shaving him and cutting his testicles off! My poor scared, baby kitty! (For some reason the process seems so much scarier and traumatic when it is MY animal enduring it!)

Well, it has to get done. And I know that he’s in good hands because I took him to the clinic I used to volunteer at. And at least Colin is going to pick me up from work so that I won’t have to take my post-operative baby home by bus.





Thursday, July 28, 2005

(11:45 pm)

I’m starting to wonder if I have a sleeping disorder. I mean, I’ve always found it difficult to actually get myself to go to bed at night (since I’m such a night owl), but recently I’ve been sleeping for hours and hours but still feel just as tired when I wake up as I did when I went to sleep. This is making it even more difficult to get up in the morning than usual.

In other news, Karma’s surgery appears to have gone very well. All the vet techs and receptionists I talked to when we picked him up commented on what a sweet kitty he is, and one of them even said she had been slipping to the back to give him cuddles whenever possible. This is high praise coming from veterinary professionals, let me tell you!

I was a little worried that it would be difficult to convince Karma to get in his cat carrier, and I didn’t want to have to try to stuff a sick cat into it, but I needn’t have worried. He took one look at the carrier and literally RAN into in, then turned around and looked up at me as if to say, “Well? What are you waiting for? Take me HOME!” Poor scared little guy!

Karma is behaving normally and seems to have forgiven us for his ordeal. He hasn’t been licking at his incision very much, so I didn’t bother putting a cone on him. He does look a little silly with his little naked (shaved) pink balls showing though. Angie has taken to calling him “Mr. Bald Balls”, but the fur will grow back soon enough.

(3:30 pm)

Speaking of fur, yesterday at Fan Attic my manager and I were talking and ended up on the subject of art and things, and she wanted to show me some of her aunt’s artwork online. I tell ya, it is a strange feeling to be surfing through VCL with your own manager! My manager was like, “ My aunt and her husband are both furries. …Er, you know what a furry is, right?” I said, “Um… yes, I do. And by a very broad definition some people would consider me to be furry too, though I don’t consider myself one.” To which she replied, “Oh, good! Well, my aunt took me to a furry convention down in Florida to meet her online boyfriend a few years ago. We got there, met him for the first time, and he proposed to her two hours later. They’ve been married now for almost 6 years.” I must say, it is nice to know that some internet relationships actually work out. And I never expected to have that sort of conversation with a manager.

I wasn’t quite brave enough to ask if she’s a furry herself, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask if she had ever heard of Otherkin, though I wouldn’t be surprised if she has.

I’ve been feeling pretty good lately and have had my schedule changed around due to moving, so I keep forgetting to take my meds. I don’t remember how long I was off them, but I started taking them again on Monday because I noticed an increase in negative thought processes again. I must’ve been off them for a while, because today I think I’ve been experiencing some side effects again.

There’s still no sign of a modem at my house. (Grrr….) I wish it would come soon. I managed to read Sel’s LJ. I’m so proud of him! Applying for jobs and getting out and doing things… I hope he gets a job soon so he won’t be in such a crunch for cash. I also wish that I could get back online so that he won’t have to feel so lonely.





Friday, July 29, 2005

(4:25 pm)

Well, I’m working at Virgin today. My manager here is stressed and grumpy because we are in the middle of a huge markdown on our CD’s, have boxes and boxes of stock to receive, are short staffed, are almost to month end (which is when all our book promotions and best-sellers change, and he keeps finding errors in how things were entered into the computer. Thank God I haven’t given him any reason to be mad at me.

Random thought for the day: I think it would be cool to have a job as a copy editor.