Yeah, I know I haven't been posting lately, but I'm working 8-and-a-half-hour days, and with tax season coming to an end, work has been crazy-nutso. Add to that the fact that the tax office I'm working at is rather posh, with rather wealthy clients (one drove up one day in a Jaguar and talked about how his company was working on [large-scale televised entertainment event redacted due to confidentiality restrictions] and [Canadian large-scale televised entertainment event redacted due to confidentiality restrictions] and because of that had to give up on [even larger-scale televised sports event redacted due to confidentiality restrictions]), and these clients can be rather high-maintenance and frustrating. So, suffice to say, I've been working my butt off and when I get home I'm just too tired to post.

What am I doing now that I can post? Sitting in the jury room at the county courthouse. I got called in today, and they're selecting for a six-week trial. (Yikes.) So a bunch of people (myself included) filled out I-have-an-honest-hardship-please-don't-pick-me-for-this questionnaires, and I think they're still sorting through them. I missed out on the first round of excusals, but hopefully I can get excused today. I really don't want to have to call my temp job and tell them I have to be back tomorrow. They already didn't like the fact that I had to be here today with Tax Day on Monday. Praise the Lord the court has wi-fi.

Now we're just sitting around doing absolutely nothing. The jury admin guy hasn't said anything in close to an hour and a half. I've spent most of the day watching last year's Eurovision Song Contest and creating a drinking game. Give singers an international stage and millions of viewers and have them try to win a singing contest, and tropes will appear. The Fan of Added Drama and Key Change of Added Drama, to give a few examples. Gimmicky costumes also tend to show up every once in a while, as does what I call "alleged English," which is when you get non-native English speakers writing or translating songs into English to try and get a bigger international audience and not bothering to have native English speakers edit it. Belarus' song last year is so chock full of alleged English (and really thick accents) that I can't make out more than about 80% of the words. (Note the use of gimmicky costumes; also, "heartfully" is not a real word. The fun is that what they sing is only about an 80% match of the lyrics posted online. I think.)

***

Luckily, the jury admin guy started reading off names not long after I started writing this, and I got excused from the selection and released for the day. So I called Temp Job and offered to come in, but I'd only be in for 2 hours, so the office manager told me to just not bother. So I got a full day off of work in the busiest week of tax season. No, I won't be paid for it, but I needed the mental health break. I do not know how they do this every year.

So, I really owe you all a post about how awesome my Paul McCartney Experience was. Because it was so awesome, witness must be paid to said awesomeness. Yes, it was that awesome. (Think I've used "awesome" enough times so far?) But to be honest, between continual temping and trying (and failing) to get my next book review filmed, I haven't had a lot of time to sit and collect thoughts on much of anything. I've had about two or three fairly good ideas spinning around my head, but I haven't even been able to squeeze more than two or three sentences about each one. But tonight I'm making myself do this, because I really want to be fairly emo about today, but I want to focus on good things first. The whining will come later.

So...

( 'And the first one said to the second one there, I hope you're having fun...' )

Mood tired Music Take On Me - A-ha Tags: adventures, argh, squee!!!, yes i'm a youtube addict

I leave two weeks from today on my Temp Job Adventure (if you haven't noticed, it's also become one of my New Year's Resolutions to type in Title Case as often as possible. It's an easy way to add emphasis without overusing bold and/or italics, and it can also make something sound Way More Epic Than Before), and I haven't really considered what clothes to pack, or what to take along. I'm "stockpiling" my favorite things to do and videos to watch so I have something to do when it gets boring up there, so it's getting boring down here. Lots of downloading, considering that QI isn't available in the States and I won't have access to Hulu so I can watch Outer Space Astronauts whenever I want. (Seriously, that is a funny show. Kind of like Galaxy Quest on crack.) At the very least I should go through my closet and dresser and make a note of what I want to bring so it'll be quicker to pack when it gets closer, though I suspect I might pad the work wardrobe once the paychecks start coming... just so when I get back home I'll have so many nice clothes to wear that will just sit in my closet and use up what little space I have in there. Maybe I need to rethink that.

In addition to putting off preparations for leaving, I'm also working on a piece for an essay collection (something along the lines of Chicks Dig Time Lords, which is the only similar Book of a Fannish Nature I know of at the moment, thanks to taraoshea ), and so I'm trying to figure out why bad movies are so painful to us, which requires figuring out why good movies are so good to us... yes, it's a Mystery Science Theater 3000 book, and that's all I'm going to say right now beyond How So Freaking Badly I would love to be published. The deadline is the end of January, which means I need to get it done before I leave for Grandparents... I started to hash out an outline a few days ago, and it turned into a page and a half of paragraphs, and almost 1,000 words. Wow my paper writing skills came back fast. Unfortunately, thanks to that whole why-do-bad-movies-hurt-us-so issue, and trying to keep it as academic as possible, I've hit a pause right now, as the articles and books the editor recommended to me aren't available here in town or online. (I would almost kill for the access I had to journals and databases that I had while at Liberty. Okay, maybe not kill. But I might kiss a guy if it got me access. This makes me a Major Nerd... with problems... who is possibly a lonely person... destined to live alone with Too Many Cats.)

I really need to tidy up my room so I don't leave a mess behind when I go. I'm still painfully short on storage space, so a lot of things end up on the floor... I also hate folding laundry so it sits in the hamper while dirty clothes pile up elsewhere. This is what happens when finally nobody cares how clean your room is after 3 years of Thrice-Weekly Room Checks.

I've been sitting on this update all day, so I should probably post it, seeing as I have nothing else to add. :-)

Mood restless Music Short Skirt, Long Jacket - Cake Tags: adventures, grandparental units, mst3k, writing

Every so often, something will happen that reminds me just how funny life is, and even though it was crazy, everything went just right.

My car has been shimmying something terrible the last few months, and so finally Dad told me I could take it to the tire place to get it looked at, because he thought something was just off balance. The tire store is one of about 5 businesses that are all one right after the other, so I had the option of turning left (on a busy road) and going right into the parking lot, or taking the back road near Taco Bell. I always go this way, since it also means I don't have to stop at a light, and just as I pass Taco Bell, I start to run out of gas. (That's a story for another day.) Fortuitously, I'm right at the gas station. I figure I'll coast up to the pump, no problem, but another car pulls up to it from the other direction! So I end up leaving the car where it was (probably wouldn't have been able to get even a few more feet out of it), grabbing the gas can, and getting gas that way. Once that's taken care of, I pull up to an empty pump, and then promptly realized the gas tank was on the other side. So I have to wait for another pump to open up...

Finally I made it the 100 feet to the tire place. I talk to the guy, and explain the problem as best I can, not knowing much anything about cars. He asks me to take him to the car, and he points out to me the massive hunk of missing tread. Seriously, you could see the steel belt underneath. He refused to let me leave with the car in that state, and so now I had to think about buying a tire. $40 for a used tire, $80 for new. I had Dad's $30, and he was doing AWANA training.

I had to call him, since spending money on a new tire isn't exactly on my list of things I want to buy now that I'm jobless, and managed to catch him during a break. He said get the used tire. So I go in to tell the guy we'll get a used tire, and he said they didn't have any that fit the car. Are you kidding me. So I text Dad, and he says get the new tire. Now he owes me $50. And I got to walk to McDonald's and have pancakes for breakfast. Yum.

So, that was my morning. Grandma and Grandpa came over, since they wanted to see a gospel quartet perform at a nearby church, and they're spending the night with us and leaving tomorrow. This is Grandpa's first major outing since his transplant, and so even though we're only a few hours away, it was nice to see him out and about. And then Armine and Hrayr came over to visit and we all had dinner together. They brought Wii Sports Resort with them (Hrayr's birthday present), and I kicked some major butt during the Swordplay Showdown. That is a killer workout.

So, probably time to wrap this up, since I've got church in the morning... there's no way on Earth I can pull the I-was-awake-til-3-am-so-I-took-some-Tylenol-PM-and-slept-through-my-alarm-because-I-still-had-so-much-of-it-in-my-system excuse for missing first service again this week, even though that was the honest truth. (Mostly because we're going out to lunch after first service tomorrow, so I won't have second service to fall back on.)

Mood tired Music Gone - Switchfoot Tags: adventures

Went to the Newsboys concert tonight (last night? argh, whatever), and boy, do I have some stories for you... but right now I need to catch some sleep make it to work on time, so this is a work in progress until I'm coherent enough I get a chance to really tell it well.

( Cut b/c it's �ber long, but you gotta read this. )

Location daybed Mood exhausted Music Boycott Hell - Newsboys Tags: adventures, argh, seriously?!?, squee!!!

I need to find my jewelry making stuff. I went to Columbia State Park today with Tahleen, Tahleen's new boyfriend (boy isn't that weird to say) Stephen, and Lauren. We went to this gift shop, and I found some awesome gemstones for sale, ready to be turned into necklaces. They already had an anchor and a ring, and they came with free silk cord so there's no work involved. String the necklace, tie the knot, and go.

Anyway, the box said they were called fluorite octahedrons, but the pictures were so unlike anything I'd seen before, or searched for on the net. They're freakin' awesome. There were two small, kinda greenish ones, and one larger, kinda pinkish/purplish one. Since they were only $3 a piece, I bought all three, and now I'm going to have a necklace and matching earrings (and three pieces of silk cord).

We left after lunch, but about 30 minutes into the drive Tahleen got a flat tire, so we waited on the side of the highway (just a little two-lane deal) while Tahleen and Stephen figured out how to change the tire. Finally, a kind gentleman came and helped them get the tire off and the car jacked up. What were Lauren and I doing? Well... taking pictures of the Highway 108 scenery. I mean, I've never changed a tire before, and Lauren still isn't driving yet, so we just stayed out of the way, though I did help find the page in Tahleen's owner's manual on how to change a tire. It took about 30-45 minutes, then we were on our way.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful - spent about 45 minutes walking around the cemetery, which goes all the way back to the pioneer days, but is still in use, making it the second active cemetery I've ever been in. I don't mind historical cemeteries, and for someone creeped out by death, 300-year-old cemeteries are actually kind of cool, but active cemeteries are unnerving. The couple of hours I spent at Arlington National Cemetery were different, because we were walking around from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to Arlington House to the JFK Memorial to the Iwo Jima Memorial, and then back to the car. Plus you're not really supposed to walk between the graves at Arlington, which is what we did today. Well, I walked between the graves. I don't think it's respectful to walk over someone's grave. Tahleen walked all over the place, and even stepped on a few of the short stones meant to mark the opposite end of a particular grave (nobody uses them nowadays; it's more of a historical thing). I love Tahleen like a friend/adopted cousin/younger sister, but that was poor behavior. Eventually, we headed back down to Columbia's main street and looked in the gift shops, which is where I got my sweet jewelry, which I will put together once I can find some French hooks and needlenosed pliers, which I can't do until I get paid, which will hopefully be tomorrow. (That's a lot of "which's.")

Woohoo - one week until Newsboys! Also got invited to see the local ballet company do Romeo and Juliet on Saturday, so this is going to be one busy weekend coming up! *is excited*

Mood mellow Music Get on Your Boots - U2 Tags: adventures

Yesterday was the San Francisco Trip II: Electric Bugaloo, and it was pretty awesome overall. We (Shannon, Lauren, Tahleen, Shannon's friend Chris, and me) left at the unholy hour of 7-something AM, but a stop at Starbucks made up for it, as I discovered the greatness that is their morning bun. We made it to San Francisco with plenty of time, since the tours started at 10 AM, so we putzed around Borders, then walked down to Pier 40.

( Cut to be kind to my f-list. It's kinda long... )

Location daybed Mood sore Music Billy S - Skye Sweetnam Tags: adventures

I swear, some days I think I could turn my life into a TV show. Not one of those Wonder Years-type shows, but weirder, like Friends or The Class, or maybe The Middleman, but without the intra-/extra-/juxta-terrestrial incidents. And the quirky, bohemian roommates.

( Last time on 'Middlegirl'... )

Mood relieved Music Do the Ballpoint! - The Rifftones Tags: adventures, christmas, my life is a tv show