moriath

My husband's parents are on facebook. I am terrified they are going to try to add me as friends. They're good people but I DO NOT WANT them involved in my intertube life in any way, shape, or form.

So far they haven't added me, so this is probably a baseless worry, but still.

So...I kind of hate the post office here. Never before have I had so many freakin' problems just getting stuff through the mail. Wedding invitations and RSVPs were lost, and getting anything larger than an envelope delivered is a herculean task. When we first moved here, they would just leave shit at our door without so much as a knock to inform us something was at the door. I wasn't entirely comfortable with that because who knows how honest our neighbors are, but at least I was getting my stuff (and to my knowledge, nothing was stolen - my neighbors all seem to keep to themselves but are nice on the occasions we do interact, so I have nothing against them now). NOW I have to obsessively watch the USPS track and confirm page to try to figure out when my stuff will be arriving and if the post office has allegedly tried to deliver it, because the last few times they've neglected to leave their little redelivery notices.

So last week I bought some stuff on ebay and it was mailed out on Monday. Yay! Track it all week and yesterday at 6:00 am it arrived at my local post office. I checked the track and confirm page periodically throughout the morning, but it (allegedly) never left the post office. And then I stayed at home for the whole rest of the day (since I left work early and got home around 1), but nothing ever arrived.

Wake up early this morning, since Billy had to get up early for class (and may or may not have SAT on my BROKEN TOE while he was getting ready), and the first thing I did was check the status of my eBay package. Nothing had changed, which I found very weird. Sat around on the computer all morning (thanks to the injured toe I'm not doing much else right now) and finally at 12:30 I decide to call the post office to see if I can get a confirmation that it will be delivered (I was contemplating going out to grab lunch and some tape for my poor injured toe).

Well, according to the post office's records, THEY DID try to deliver it yesterday. I about blew up on the phone, but either this was the same woman I talked to last time I had issues getting a package delivered, or there's an epidemic of "lost" redelivery slips because she immediately said she was going to notify the manager of the post office, and she would either schedule my package for redelivery on Tuesday or I could come down to get it.

Since I wanted my stuff, I pulled myself together, popped some ibuprofen, and started hobbling down to the post office. Got down there, stood in line for awhile, picked up my package with no problem, and hopped on a bus to get back (for some reason there's no convenient bus stop between my apartment and the post office, but going in the opposite direction there's a bust stop right outside the post office's door). Stopped at the bank to get some cash and then picked up food and medical tape at Rite Aid. All in all, trip took about an hour.

Come home, hobble up the stairs because the damn elevator isn't working AGAIN, and when I get to my door, I see a little orange slip poking out.

While I was out, the post office had tried to deliver my proofs from the photographer.

~headdesk headdesk headdesk~

Soooooooooooo...Book Expo is next week. Since I work for people who sell books, this means we have to get the showroom looking all nice and spiffy since we'll be having dozens of people come through in the next week.

That means we get hundreds of books delivered to us over the course of this week. So many books we don't have space to put them all or, when there is space, time to put them up correctly.

So yesterday I was running around the showroom barefoot because flip flops are not conducive to running around with pounds of books in your arms.

However, it does turn out that bare feet + stacks of very heavy books on the floor is conducive to stubbing your toes so hard you break one of them.

Okay, I'm not a doctor, nor can I afford to go to one (plus, what the fuck can they do for a baby toe), but I'm pretty damn sure I managed to break my little toe by walking into a stack of books. Not dropping a stack on my foot (that would make sense), but simply walking into a stack.

Yesterday my two little toes were red and hurt like hell. Today it's just the baby toe, swollen to (at least) twice its usual size and a very angry purple/red, with an ugly ring of purple bruising forming around the base. I also can't move it for the life of me. Walking is a bitch. Doing much of anything aside from sitting around and complaining is difficult.

Just posted my first comment fic to porn_battle - yay Animorphs! I started writing a (much longer) version on the train this morning and it was like meeting up with an old friend. The words just started flowing onto the page much more easily than with the novel I've been working on on and off for...ages now.

The comment-fic isn't particularly porny, but the full length version will have more to it.

Porn_battle is fun - why has no one told me about it earlier?!

porn_battle prompts are up, I skimmed them, looking for fandoms I know anything about (word to the other Animorph fan!) and see several prompts I like...for writing completely non-smutty stuff.

Am I just too old to be writing porn?

I'm gonna write down my favorite prompts and see if I can do some writing on the subway tomorrow morning.

In other news, I'm on Twitter now, mostly as a way to promote my blog(s), because I am an attention whore. However, considering the twitter is under my real name, I think I might skip publicizing any porn_battle posts over here.

Also, I've watched the entire first season of 30 Rock since last night. It is a hilarious show and I hate myself for not watching it earlier.

omg, I love summer. Screw sunny days and the lack of needing a coat; it's finally worth going to the movies again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love a good winter Oscar Bait film, but especially now that I can't see a movie in the theatres for less than $11, I'm back to using the rules for going to see movies that I had in high school: seeing it on the big screen has to really add something to the viewing experience (I also have a college-age addendum: if Johnny Depp is in it, it's worth the price of admission, even if shit isn't blowing up).

So that means I'm mostly seeing "popcorn" flicks now - because seeing Wolverine take out a helicopter (it's in the trailer, so it's not a spoiler) just wouldn't be the same in my living room. And since those don't tend to be released after Labor Day, I've been starving for some quality films. With the release of the explosion-tastic X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it's time to start watching movies again :-)

( Spoilers ahoy )

Also? Hugh Jackman is fucking hot. My list of men who I am attracted to may have just increased to three. Apparently I like brunette men who often look at least slightly disheveled.

My parents' dog died tonight. The thing was ancient and got on my last nerve more than once, but it's still sad.

Especially because she died right in the middle of the living room, in front of my brother.

It's amazing Molly lived as long as she did - we got her when I was in middle school and she was already four-five years old - meaning that she was 16-17 years old now. We weren't expecting her to make it through the winter a couple of years ago, but she kept on trudging on.

Apparently she hadn't been looking too well for the past few days, so this afternoon my mom called the vet. They couldn't fit her in today but she was all set up for an appointment tomorrow morning.

Twenty minutes later my brother went downstairs to my mom and said "I don't want to upset you, but Molly just died."

Apparently she'd been laying in the living room, stood up and took a couple of steps, made a funny noise, and then collapsed.

Dan is apparently kind of confused about how he's "supposed" to feel. It's really the first time he's faced any sort of death - he was only in 1st grade or something when we last had to put cats to sleep, and we haven't lost any close family members in either of our lifetimes (~knocks on wood~). He doesn't know if he wants to talk about it or not - at least not to my parents. Apparently when my mom got off the phone with the vet for the second time (she called them to find out just what exactly she was supposed to do at this point), she found Dan sitting on the couch with the cats, and explaining to them that they had to say goodbye to Molly because she wasn't going to be coming back from the vet.

~sigh~ Poor kid - he's had a rough year.

Was going to post pics of my new haircut (omg I went and did it. Am I crazy?!?!?!), but now it doesn't feel like the right time. Check back tomorrow.

Specter says he's switching from GOP to Dems:
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement: "Some in the Republican Party are happy about this. I am not. Let's be honest: Senator Specter didn't leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record. Republicans look forward to beating Sen. Specter in 2010, assuming the Democrats don't do it first."

...If Specter has a "left-wing voting record," wouldn't that imply that he has some sort of principles that do not mesh with the Republican party?

And what politician hasn't made a move because it would further her or his political interests?

Every time this guy makes a statement, he strikes me as more and more ridiculous.

GM cutting jobs, getting rid of Pontiac

When I first read the headline I almost had a heart attack, thinking they were getting rid of a whole plant in Pontiac, Michigan. But rather they're getting rid of the Pontiac brand of cars. Sad face. I've owned two cars in my life, and both were Pontiac Sunfires. The first one was a tough little car that lasted forever and hardly gave me any trouble until it unceremoniously DIED on the side of I-75 at three in the morning (with a baby Gopher as my co-pilot). I also felt like a badass for being one of the few people I knew (and the only woman at the time) who could drive a stick shift.

The second one was a piece of shit, but I still have an affinity for the Sunfires. If I ever had to buy another car, I'd definitely start by looking at Sunfires.

Hopefully, however, that won't come to pass. I <3 NY.

Seriously. Part of the reason I chose to keep the Banana job after I got my new one was because Banana had been in the habit of scheduling me for 1-2 days a week, when I was available for 7 days. So I figure if I chop down my available days by at least half, they'll still be only scheduling me for 1-2 days a week.

Last week I was scheduled 21 hours; this week it was 12 (because I had explicitly requested Sunday off to regain some sanity) - next week I'm back up to 20: 6 hours on Sunday, then 4 hours each on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. That's essentially using every single hour that I'm available.

The upside of this is that it's finally kicking me into gear to get a savings account set up this weekend. I talked about it with Billy and we decided that once I've paid off my credit card bill and we've saved 2-3 months worth of rent and utilities, we'll feel comfortable enough for me to be OUT of Banana. If they keep scheduling me like crazy, that day will come sooner rather than later.

Also what is helping: I've started using Mint to keep track of our spending and have discovered some shocking things - like how much money we spend on eating out every month. It shouldn't really be surprising, since I've been buying my lunch at work every day for a month, but most of the time lunch is a bagel with cream cheese from Dunkin' Donuts and a Coke picked up from a hot dog vendor. Those $2-3 lunches add up. So Billy and I are going to renew our efforts to pack our lunches and eat dinners at home, and maybe limit going out to once per week.

We're also going to drop cable TV. ~gasp~ But seriously, we spend $85-95 a month on our cable/internet package (depending on if we buy a pay-per-view movie) - only $30 of that is internet. We don't watch $55+ of TV a month. The only reason we were hesitating was because we do like to watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on nights when I'm actually home - but I just checked and both of them put their shows online. So we're doing it! We're going TV-less! And then we'll finally have enough money to renew our Netflix account!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Who knew I could get so excited about saving money?

But the "fuck you" to Banana Republic still stands.

Post-wedding, I find myself "nesting," for lack of a better word. I think all of the energy I put into wedding planning needs to go somewhere, and the "next step" of being a grown up is setting up house, right?

Except I've been working on setting up house slowly but surely for the past five years - or earlier (seriously, I have furniture in this apartment that I picked up in high school, specifically planning on bringing to my first New York studio apartment. And look where it ended up!). Also, we are on a tight budget as we recover from the wedding, and live in an apartment that we may or may not be in after next year, so there's only so much I can do as I try to set up house.

There are a few things I want, however. Like this:
Baker's Rack with Cutting Board

The apartment's kitchen came with about a square foot of counter space. And only a bit more cabinet space. So back when we moved in my mom took us to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought us (among many, many other things) a wire shelf/rack set up that has worked pretty well as an impromptu kitchen counter (and coffee table - with four shelves the thing was too tall, but the top shelf section was just the right height to become a coffee table). But it's kind of narrow, and since it's a wire shelf system, it's not the most solid surface ever.

This, however, I am sure would solve all of my problems. Ever.

Except for decorating and storing stuff in the rest of the apartment.

And that's where Target comes in:
Itso Storage system

For some reason I love the look of the cube storage system. There's just so much you can do with it! And this one even has the dark brown wood with red accent pieces - perfect for the apartment.

Except, the wood laminate cubes are, naturally, more expensive than the plain white plastic cubes. So I'm going to start picking up the white plastic ones and using my mad craft skills (ha, pun!) to make them awesome with decopage and stuff.

Trust me, it will be awesome.

And now, I'm going to go back to wrestling with Facebook to let me upload my wedding pictures!

So a little over a year ago, I made my big hair change, going from this:

(April 2007 at Nationals)

To this:

(3/15/08)

I've been keeping it around that length or a little bit longer for the past year. But now it's been three months since my last hair cut and it's looking pretty ragged (not to mention my roots are hideous right now - haven't dyed my hair since two days before the wedding, hence the lack of a 'what I look like right now' picture). So I'm going to get it cut again soon, but I need to figure out just what it is I want to do. I think it's time for another change, because the bangs have never quite worked out for me the way I've wanted them to.

So today I discovered Mop Shots, which provides a pretty cool service for people who can go to designer salons and drop $100+ on a haircut since it tells you WHERE people got their hair done. For me, I like it because it has a pretty specific search function. It seems to be a fairly new site because there aren't eleventy-million pictures yet. I've discovered two styles that I think I really want to try. Anyone want to weigh in?

Punk Bob

No, I'm not going to be putting the blue in my hair (SIGH - though I've been thinking about bleaching out my bangs and returning to my high school roots, lol), but I like how this still has some length to it. My concern would be on the upkeep however, as I imagine it could look very awkward if/when I started to grow it out again.

Layered Bob

I really like this one, but am afraid my hair might be too fine to pull it off. Would I need a straightening iron to keep all those little layers in check? 'Cause if so, that's a big NO right there (not that I have anything really against straightening irons, I just can't ever justify the purchase of one for myself). But it's cute and hip and I'm pretty sure my bangs are already long enough to pull it off...

I feel like this is a sort of ramble-y entry - I blame it on sleep deprivation (I know, it's the weekend, and I didn't work today because I requested it off, but I got a very nice wake-up call at 5 this morning, and then couldn't fall back asleep until 9 thanks to the wake-up antics, so I've been feeling tired all day). So I apologize for the ramblings, but I'm serious about the hair change. Any thoughts?

Couldn't I have ONE VENDOR from the wedding who is on top of her/his shit? It's bad when my mother was the most responsive/timely person I worked with (I love my mother dearly, but procrastination is one of her worse habits).

It seems pretty standard to have to wait until a month after the wedding to see your wedding pictures. It took just a little bit more than that for us to even see them online, but I was okay with that, because within a week of seeing them online we were supposed to get our CD so we could do what we wanted with the pictures, making it a little less than a month and a half between the wedding and having pictures in our hot little hands.

On Tuesday we hit the two month mark and I don't think our photographer has put our CD in the mail yet. Her intern was supposed to do it before Jen went on some trip, but that didn't happen, then Jen told me the pictures would be in the mail by Friday (yesterday) and she'd e-mail me when they went out. No e-mail yet.

In happier news, earlier this week I won my Con or Bust auction, so I'm talking with someone to get a handmade scrapbooking journal for the pictures to go in. The plan was originally for it to be for my parents...but the more I talk to her, the more selfish I get, lol. Today's revelation: while she was poking through her supplies she found some stickers of the medallions from Pirates of the Caribbean! Oh, and this was BEFORE I told her that I am obsessed with love the films, lol. So, getting this journal was totally fate...and I don't know if I'll be able to part with it!

ETA: ~bangs head~ two seconds after I e-mailed her, I got an e-mail back from Jen. Now something went wrong with our proofs (so I guess we are getting a CD + small physical copies of all of them - I'd forgotten, but this is cool) so she had to re-order them. Our discs are going in the mail today, but it will be a while longer on the proofs. Apparently her intern isn't doing her job (sounds like someone needs a new intern! I've forgotten to bring stuff over to the UPS store before, but it was stupid things like recycling the printer cartridge, NOT something that someone was actually waiting for and had spent a lot of money on!)

So I'm standing at the sink washing dishes and my mind wanders to movies, as it often does. For some reason I started thinking about 'Independence Day,' specifically when Vivica A. Fox's character tells the first lady that she "voted for the other guy."

And in that moment I realized for the very first time why President Roslin has always looked familiar to me.

She played the first lady in Independence Day.

So that schedule for next week finally showed up.

I'm allegedly working from 9:45 to 6:45 on Sunday, then 6 to 10 on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Considering working six hours on Sunday this week and then 6 to 10 on Wednesday and Thursday wiped me out this week, I'm totally NOT working all of those hours this week.

I know that in some ways I'm an incredibly lucky person - there are so many people right now that would kill for one job, let alone two. On the other hand, BECAUSE I have two jobs, I would prefer that I not be scheduled for the maximum number of hours at my second job, and instead those hours go to someone that truly needs them. If I could go from working almost 20 hours a week to something closer to 20 hours a month there, I would be extremely happy.

So our new scheduling agreement at work supposedly guarantees that we will have our schedule for the next week by Thursday at noon, at the latest. Not that I've EVER seen it then, but we at least usually get it on Thursday, posted at the store and/or e-mailed to us.

Well, I left the store at 10 last night, nothing posted - it's now quarter to nine the next morning and there's still no e-mail.

So I decided to check my spam folder, just to make sure it hadn't ended up in there.

While in the spam folder, I discovered that I had been sent 140+ spam e-mails on Wednesday, all with almost identical subjects (some spam genius has decided to start modeling spam messages on mailer daemon failed delivery messages).

Thank god for Gmail's spam filter.

Not thanking god for Banana Republic. I am super tired and achy and rather upset that I didn't find out until Wednesday that we were going to be open Easter Sunday, and now it's Good Friday and we still don't have our schedules (despite the brand new scheduling agreement they were so eager for me to sign last month - does this mean I don't have to hold up my end of the bargain on giving proper notice for calling in sick?). I'm not celebrating Easter, and haven't for a long time, but what if I was? It's the principle of the thing.

Worked another 12+ hour day yesterday, thanks to my unholy combination of jobs. I am SO TIRED right now. And I blame Billy - if he hadn't had a full pork chop dinner waiting for me when I got home, I would have been asleep an hour earlier.

But it was very sweet for him to make me dinner, so I'll forgive him.

Tonight I do the same thing, though hopefully I'll get out of work on time rather than at 10:30. If there's a perfect close tonight I might hurt someone - at least if they put me back in the sale section alone again.

At some point Billy and I are going to have a conversation about whether it's really worth it for me to keep working both jobs. We could certainly use the money, but it's also driving me up a freaking wall.

Dear economy: please get better soon so I can NOT be underemployed for once in my life. I think that would be a wonderful feeling.

Something about Reese Witherspoon (whom I omg!love) giving the Vulcan salute...and apparently Star Trek is one of the big summer films she's looking forward to...I'm in love.

Hopefully going to see her new movie (Monsters vs. Aliens) tomorrow. I've heard some mixed reviews on it, but there's also the major plus that (apparently) she plays a kick ass woman who can take care of herself and isn't the love interest/damsel in distress. Also there's supposed to be plenty of homages to old school horror films. And Stephen Colbert is president. Really really want to see it, but it may end up being a rental.

So, almost two months ago I started my new job. And shortly after starting this job I tried to quit at Banana Republic, because originally I was told the only way I could stay on the schedule there and not work Monday-Friday was to leave my Saturday and Sunday completely open. Which led to working 13 days straight when I returned to work after the wedding. Not cool.

So I talked to my manager and told him I was going to have to quit because this shit was bananas. Because my manager loves me, he didn't want me to quit so we worked out an alternative: I take Saturdays off, leave my Sundays free, and then set my availability for three four hour shifts at night during the week, say from six until ten. Since the last shift currently ends at nine and they aren't scheduling shifts shorter than four hours, I'll still be on the schedule and technically fulfilling my availability requirements, but I won't have to worry about being scheduled until summer.

I guess by "summer" he meant "April 2nd" because on Thursday I'm working from 6 until 10. After working from 10-5:30 at the real job.

If the stores hours have changed, I really might have to quit for real, because I don't think my sanity can handle 12+ hour days.

Wedding pictures were posted online today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The CD of them for Billy and I should be in the mail by the end of the week. Then I will start posting my faves online :-)