Archive for September, 2006
to my cat,
and to the stuff on which he sheds,
one apartment,
under the sun,
with cat food and toy fishies
for all.
Because I can’t stand being american anymore. This is not the country I was born in; this is not the country I want to remain living in. I can’t kill myself to escape it (for a number of reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture) — but I can’t really go anywhere else right now. The job I have barely lets me tread water at the moment; saving money to move to Canada or Japan or Ireland or somewhere (South Africa? Namibia?) is really out of the question.
I guess the first step is to find a cheaper place to live and get my passport…
Posted in 
Weirdly enough, after almost a _year_ of not driving a car, I have found that I much prefer a scooter to a car. Oh, sure, with a car I can get on the highway and I don’t get wet when it rains, but I can’t hear or see anything, either. And cars are big and clumsy to park and good LORD but do they cost an excessive amount to fill with fuel.
I rented a car last weekend when Ev and Ivan came in. It had less than a half-tank when I picked it up, and I had to refill it before I could go down to the airport. I spent over twenty-five dollars on one tank of gas for that car. I just did the math, and for Adenydd? I’ve bought $144 worth of gas (appx. 48 gallons) in a year. That’s it. And that, boys and girls, is why I love my Adenydd.
…but not terribly thrilled. First the happy things:
– Ivan and Ev are both settling in nicely, though Ivan thinks we’re keeping him in kitty-jail and tries to escape on a regular basis. He’s not losing his collar as often as he once was, so that’s a plus. We need to get him a kitty tree.
– There’s a big shindig-slash-training thing that my company is putting on on Friday, which will be the very first ever company party that I’ve been to. I promise not to get drunk and embarass myself.
– My mother is an awesome, awsome person and I cannot possibly ever communicate just how grateful I am that she has yet to abandon me on a street corner to fend for myself.
– Mom sent Ev and I a box of stuff, which includes birthday goodies for me! Yay! Even better is the fact that it came today!
– I got the latest issue of Game Informer, which makes Devil May Cry 4 sound like the only reason to buy a PS2 (at least for me, at this point — if I buy _any_ next-gen console, it’s probably going to be a Wii. Twilight Princess, oooooh…); The Dark Wizard Of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones; a new issue of Shonen Jump; and a newsletter from one of the yarn shops I frequent.
Now for the not-happy things:
– Last Tuesday, some complete fuckwit ass-nugget dead-goat-blowing jerkoff knocked my scooter over. Yeah, they picked it up, but they couldn’t be bothered to leave me a fucking note. What, like I wouldn’t NOTICE little things like the right-side mirror being completely loose and swinging in the breeze (I use a fucking crescent wrench to cinch that fucker in place because you can’t stop it from loosening back up with your hand alone. There’s no way it moves when I’m done adjusting it outside of someone or something giving it a good hard whack.)? Or the cosmetic damage on the side that it DID NOT fall on the first (and only!) time I dropped it? Or the fact that the center stand is now fucking BENT, so that it scrapes along the ground and makes horrible noises and doesn’t get into the proper position for riding until it has? The motherfucker owes me at LEAST compensation for parts and labor, and I have no way of finding out who did it.
– Thanks to the now-funky center stand, I managed to knock Adenydd over myself on Saturday. Argh. Also, the mirrors are still wonky and I haven’t had the time or energy to devote to fixing them.
– Yesterday, on my way home, my bag and my rain pants fell off of the back of my scooter on my way down one of the major thoroughfares. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve both of them, with neither being too much the worse for it (save for my little tube of sunscreen, but I couldn’t care less about -that- — I was even prepared to abandon my pants — as long as I got my bag back). Getting my bag back involved completely freaking out a woman by riding the wrong way down the sidewalk, which was pretty damn cool, if I do say so. After I fetched my bag, I stuffed it into my Givi box and headed home… And I managed to snag my pants which were on the next block up from my bag. When I got home, I discovered that my box was about ready to fall off of the back of my scooter, because the mounting hardware has come loose AGAIN. I can either ask Nick to fix it or I can get Ev to help me, but I’ve got to fix _that_ now… I want to do it on saturday, but I’ll probably have to do it Thursday night.
– I also started yesterday with the lovely news that I was over FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS in the red at my bank… I’m still A) completely lost as to how I managed _that_ (I bought food and paid bills. And, yes, I bought a few things that I probably shooooouldn’t have, but I didn’t go out and drop five hundred dollars at Kinokuniya, as I could so easily do…) and B) about 30 bucks negative at this point. I am hopeful, though, that it will stay that way until I get paid on Thursday night…
– Adenydd needs an oil change and tuneup (she’s almost a year old!), plus the aforementioned maintenence. There’s no way in hell I can afford that and rent and bills and the fuckwits that want money from me keep fucking calling and if I’m late to work any more they’re gonna fire me and sweet heavenly DAYS but I need a different job, because tonight there was a travel agent freaking out over how her clients were in the wrong rooms and it was the end of the world! and I very nearly told her that I was very sorry, but I couldn’t see the problem and frankly I just didn’t _give_ a gold-plated shit one way or the other…
Yeah. So, I’m alive and I at least am not by myself at the moment, which is a really good thing. I’m going to try to go to sleep, now, and maybe this will all look better in the morning.
Today, I worked on a booking where the person was named Vanilla. Yes, just like the flavor.
On the one hand, I don’t think I’d name _my_ kid Vanilla, but on the other hand, it’s _much_ prettier than, say, Maynard Ignacious.
Bah, I can’t find it. Oh well, at least I know where the originals are.
Also, I am amazed by some of the stuff Tripod still has on their servers. *Blinkblink*
Waaaaaaigh. So, the good news is that I’m not dead and I’m not fired! I’ve just been really really busy. So, a quick recap of the last couple of weeks:
– I am now older than I was at this time last year. Surprise.
– I got a GREAT birthday present, though: my supervisor came over and told me that she’d had a meeting with the other folks in the company and it was unanimous: they’re keeping me. I GET HEALTH BENEFITS! It has been, I don’t know, like three years since the last time I had healthcare that I only had to pay part of. Oi.
– I went to the doctor for an annual exam. Other than being mildly yelled at for weighing more than I shooooould and not exercising enough, it went okay. At least until I checked my mail today, and discovered that the lab that did the slide-ogling wants sixty dollars from me before they send me my results… (And they’ve spelled my name ‘Shanas’ all over it. The hell?)
– The last two people in my section from my training class have been moved away… Jack went to a different department (hooray for him!) and Ella got moved because -she- had a big desk and it was being given to a lead…who telecommutes and therefore will only be sitting there about one day a month. I think that the telecommuters should get their own little private cubefarm somewhere on a different floor, preferably in a closet or something, since they’re almost never in the building. Why waste perfectly good space and muck up other people’s cozy spheres for people that are never around?
– In other news, speaking of moving, Ev and Ivan are coming down! Ev’s gonna hang out here for a couple of months and see if he can’t get a job and find a place of his own, and Ivan’s coming to live with me! Yay. I’ve missed them both.
– I’ve been invited to play with a D&D group that is currently run by a guy I work with. He’s got his own setting and everything, and he seems like he’d be a pretty good GM/DM. I’m thinking I’ll use Neddy, if he doesn’t have any restrictions on race or alignment… Not that there’s a huge problem with me and alignment — I generally tend to play Lawful Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Good or Chaotic Good characters. I think it’s because I tend to be more Chaotic Good myself… Or maybe just Chaotic, period. Heh. I’ll ask him tomorrow, when I get a chance.
And now I’m wondering whatever happened to my big list of characters with the links to profiles for each of them… I know where all of the original documents are, but I’m trying to recall where I put it up online. I think it was probably on Tripod, either ladys_secret_life or Konamasi, but I forget which it was.