Well, I've been here at my grandparents' house for 5 days, and life seems good so far. I don't get on the internet as often as I do at home, because a) there's no wi-fi, so I'm not on Eleanor (the laptop), and b) because their computer is so slow. (They have cable internet, so it's near to blazing fast - faster than the DSL we have at home - but they need a crapload of RAM. They only have 248 MB. That's roughly 1/8 the RAM Eleanor has. They also need a new sound card, but that's neither here nor there.) Anyway, the point of that is that I hope I'll be able to check in on the weekends, but I don't think I'll be able to do much around here during the week. I'm thinking I might type a post on Eleanor during the evenings and then copy and paste it on LJ from my grandparents' computer on the weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to buy a new camera soon, and then I can share pics of what life is like around here.

Work is good so far. They hired me as a receptionist to answer calls and make appointments for the tax preparers, but the calls haven't been coming in very much this week (I started Thursday), so Grandma has had me help her reconcile bank accounts for all these gas stations they do the books for. I was an English major. I love words. Numbers drive me crazy because they have to add up perfectly. Words allow for interpretation and play. I love the artistry of a well-crafted sentence. There is no artistry in numbers. So naturally this task is driving me up the wall, especially when I think I have everything plugged in correctly and I find out that the totals aren't matching, mostly because I forgot a step or hit a wrong number on the adding machine. When I get back to work on Monday I have to find out where I gained 4 cents and the last I looked, everything was matching up with the paperwork and it looks like I entered everything correctly, so who knows. Monday will also bring the "official" beginning of tax season, so the call volume should go up, which means more time with files and phones and less with those darned bank reconciliations. The best part is that I've already gotten paid! I guess they assume you'll work a full pay period and any differences will be made up in the next pay check.

Life living with my grandparents is still in the adjustment phase. I don't think of myself as a picky eater, but a lot of the things they suggest for lunch or dinner is just not up my alley. We'll just have to see what happens as the weeks go on. I've offered to cook every so often, and they liked the spaghetti I made for dinner Wednesday night, and some of the other dinner ideas have been met with interest. Other than that, it's a lot of PBS and Fox News. And the Weather Channel. After work is dinner, then Jeopardy and more Fox News, and then I usually head upstairs around 9 pm to take a shower and then I kick back in my room and watch Doctor Who and read until midnight, when I go to sleep. It's a simple life, and I'm not really complaining. I've got enough videos and books to keep me occupied at night, and I know I want to buy some more books while I'm here (Heat Wave by Richard Castle, for one). I'm also hoping to connect with my one cousin that's close to my age while I'm up here, and maybe she can show me some of the fun things that there are to do around here and get me out of the house that doesn't involve the mall or a restaurant, since that's about all the outside entertainment I know of around here so far.

Okay, time to head back downstairs and see how I can help get dinner going, since it should be dinner time soon and I'm getting hungry. I miss being able to read everybody's daily adventures, and I hope you're all doing well. :-)

Location Office, Grandparents' House, Martinez, East Bay, CA Mood hungry Tags: grandparental units, update

Warning: babbling ahead. I really should have gone to sleep a while ago, but...

Oh gosh. I leave in *quick check of the calendar* 5 days and I feel so unready. I still can't pack; I need to have clothes to wear. I don't have room to have a suitcase in here (or should I go for the massive duffel? maybe both? It will be almost the same amount of time as a semester at college), and even if I did, who wants to live out of a suitcase for 5 days in one's own house?

In the meantime, I'm still writing (almost finished; I just need to figure out how to wrap it up, still hoarding DVDs and videos, and finding new ways to keep busy. Namely by watching Doctor Who. Yeah, I joined the collective. I used to think that maybe I'd enjoy the show, being all sci-fi as it is, but I didn't know I'd enjoy it this much. It's funny! It has its tender, squishy, you-and-me-against-the-world-just-let-em-try-to-split-us-up moments, but it also has a lot of fluffy, good-times-and-best-buddies bits, too. I get those Middleman Moments where I'd think of something funny I'd seen earlier and it'd still have me giggling. (They're called "Middleman Moments" because I first got them thanks to The Middleman. I also get them now from Outer Space Astronauts, too.) I started watching the beginning of Season 2 (when David Tennant started) last week, and I just finished the season tonight. I don't think I've even blazed through The Middleman or Outer Space Astronauts that fast... of course, there are only 5 episode of OSA right now. I could blaze through the entire season (or series if it doesn't get picked up again) in one afternoon if I so chose.

I refuse to become obsessed, though, because new favorite shows are always welcome, but I don't have time for any new obsessions. And I certainly won't once I start working full time. Though I have decided that David Tennant is at least 20 kinds of awesome, and he and Ewan McGregor need to be in something together. And it has to be fluffy. (The first thing I thought of was something like Down With Love, which I adore.)

I've also decided that my LJ layout is really boring, plain, and really bland. I need to spice it up, but I don't know how, or what to make it look like. I also need a new default icon. Basically I need a change. Maybe that's one more reason why moving in with the grandparents is a good thing.

Mood restless Music Impacilla Carpisung - The Ting Tings Tags: grandparental units, writing

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

So a while ago Grandma called me to say that her boss (a CPA office; Grandma works as a bookkeeper) was looking for someone to help out in the office during tax season. They had hired a temp in the past, but it wasn't going to work out to hire her this year. Grandma knows that I'm pretty much desperate in the job hunt, so she asked her boss if he would consider hiring me. He said sure, and I went up yesterday to have an interview today.

I got the job!

It'll be full time, and they're going to pay me extremely well for a temp job, even a two-month-long one. And seeing as those grandparents live in the East Bay, I'm going to stay with them while I work there, otherwise I'd have to commute 90 minutes each way, and we can't afford to be down a car here at home.

This is where I'm most ambivalent about taking the job. I love my grandparents, honestly I do. But they're old school. To them, an evening watching preaching is Good Times (or, even worse, I swear they watch Lawrence Welk. SNL parodies are one thing, the real thing is a vastly different thing). They attend the Most Boring Church in the World (First Baptist Church of Walnut Creek, you heard it here first). They have cable internet, but a very slow computer.

They weren't kidding when they half-joked that living with them would be the hardest part of staying with them. I know they'll spoil me, and I know they know that I'm a girl who loves being connected to the internet, so I think they understood when I mentioned going down to Barnes & Noble down the hill to avail myself of their free wi-fi. But I also know that so many of the shows I like they probably wouldn't approve of, not to mention the fact that they aren't available on American TV right now. So I guess I'm going to have to stock up on videos that I can watch when things get boring. At least I can finish my cross-stitch and work on my heraldic drawings, though I probably won't bring my paint.

I'm not trying to dump on my grandparents by a long shot, but the truth of the matter is that I will probably spend a large amount of time Bored Out of My Mind. Or in possession of a Vast Number of Books, having squandered a portion of each paycheck looking for something new to read. Grandpa has a library, maybe I'll dig through that, though he mostly has philosophy, psychology, and theology books (he used to be a pastor, then a Christian counselor before kidney disease forced him to retire).

Also, look: new tag! Starting January 28, I'm probably going to need it.

Also also, going to start Couch-2-5K tomorrow morning, even though I don't know how I'm going to fit my runs into working during the daylight hours once I leave... very interested to see how that takes off.

Also also also, urge to kill Firefox rising. Anybody have an idea why it freezes and what to do about it? Chrome is a good replacement, but the adblockers for Chrome all suck most royally.

Mood blah Music Great DJ - The Ting Tings Tags: grandparental units, job hunt, work