new (old) job and planning the vacation

Blog 022608

Ahhhhhh, my first day at work at my old job. And it was easy. Custom has yet to get busy yet so my first night back was relaxing with no pressure. I got to say hello to friends I hadn’t seen in a while and goof around with others.

I didn’t sleep well during Monday day so I went back to rest on my bed for about an hour before work. I fell into sleep here and there but my stupid alarm kept waking me at the wrong time. It seemed like it would go off 15 minutes before it was suppose to. It did around three times. I somehow managed to get some sleep though in 10 minute blocks and I actually had time to dream. About work. Ha-rumph!

The area I just left called to have me come back for half the night. Some first shifters came in early though. I walked down there only to be told to go back to my new area. This will probably happen all week long.

I have my weekends off! It’s going to feel so good to be able to have two full days off. Saturday tends to suck a bit as I have to decide if or how much I want to sleep since I get out at 7am that morning. Sundays are nice and normal. I have a lot of time off on Monday to do things before sleeping 3 hours before work that night.

I reserved a room in Atlanta for preparation for DragonCon. $95 a night plus tax. Tax will probably push it up to $115 a night or even more. The place is a short three minute walk to the hotels where the con is held. I could have tried for those hotels but the lowest rates of the three was $157 a night plus tax. So by walking for 3 minutes I’m saving somewhere around $160 over four nights. I’m not sure when I’ll buy my plane ticket. I won’t wait forever because I don’t want to get screwed trying to fly home on Labor Day. I think I may want to visit the Atlanta Aquarium while I’m there if I can manage it. This’ll be my first real vacation in several years!

Wading through Anita Blake, Obsidian Butterfly right. It’s only a 600 page book. This is the 5th book I’ve read in the series. While I like the book overall it’s starting to get repetitive. There are usually three or more subplots along with the major crime committed by the big bad guy. It really feels like the big crime is maybe one-third of the book while the sub-plots are almost filler material. Sometimes they are pretty cool but they are usually red herrings for the main plot. My plan is to finish this book and the last one I got for a X-Mas gift. I will then seek out the one or two books that have my favorite character Raina in them and read those. Then I’ll probably drop the series with something like 4 or 5 books to go.

I’m looking forward to the fantasy baseball league I play in. The commish up it to 12 teams this time around. We played with 10 each of the first two years. I finished 2nd the first year and third last year. We draft our teams like in football. The better you finished the lower you pick in the first round. Then each round is flipped flopped. So I’ll pick tenth in round one and third in round two then tenth in round three and so on. I’m hoping to get Jacolby Ellsbury of the Boston Red Sox on my team because he was really exciting last year. He’s much more of a gamble this year for a lot of reasons but he was a great spark for my team last year and he was fun to watch play.

I wish my brother would stop putting dishes in the left sink. I have a kitchen sink split into left and right sides. I keep the dish holder in the right side and put all my dirty dishes in the holder on the right side. My brother puts all his dirty dishes in the left side. We both constantly use the left side for sink duties like drinking and filling pots and whatever. Why he always puts dishes in the left side leaving them often right under the faucet is beyond me. Then again, I am talking about the same brother that said he’s paranoid about germs on his hands and washes them before doing the dishes yet uses whatever towel is available not knowing its previous usage to dry the same dishes. And again, his test for towel cleanliness is to stick it to his face and sniff deeply. I guess his nose has some germ detector that mine doesn’t. I always use a clean towel to dry dishes.

I hope everything goes well, Wendy.

Finally! A Day off!

Blog 022008

Boy did I need a day off. I had President’s Day off and it refreshed me quite a bit. The Sunday night at work I barely made it in I was so tired. I lumped around work like a zombie yawning every two seconds. At 3am, 11 of the 14 of us went home. I was in bed and asleep less than 20 minutes after getting home. I slept for about 5 hours and got up. So in the end, I slept for about 13 to 14 hours in a 19 hour span.

I didn’t do much on my day off. I think I did a little bit of everything. I did some drawing, played some video games, saw my parents and watched Lord of the Rings that night. It’s one of my favorites. For whatever reason, the other two movies aren’t even in the same league as Lord. That Balrog is probably my favorite part. He looked awesome and fearsome.

Tuesday was a bit of a day of work. I cleaned the house vacuuming it, changing the sheets on my bed, cleaning the kitchen stove, doing a load of laundry and writing out some bills to pay. And later I went to work. I also went out and bought a new pair of sneakers that felt luxuriously comfortable on my first night wearing them. I also searched around for some athletic pants to replace the ones I have that ripped. I couldn’t find them which bummed me out pretty good but then located them as I walked out the store to my car. So I picked up two pairs and a shirt of the same material.

During my rounds through the mall looking for some new sneakers I passed a new store selling women’s shoes. I could see a ton of boots in there including what looked like some cool thigh highs. If only I had a girlfriend to buy them for. L

I can’t get my comics. The store is always closed before I get up. Now it’s getting downright annoying. I called late Friday and they were open. But I would have arrived, said ‘hi’, got my comics and left since I would’ve arrived at closing. I called Saturday night with some time to spare and nobody answered. I slept through their open hours on Sunday. I called Monday not really expecting them to be open. They weren’t. Called Tuesday and they were closed. Called today with almost an hour to spare and no answer. And today should have been new comics day. Sigh.

We found out my brother’s ex left her son with her girlfriend’s boyfriend for awhile. And that fellow took him to work. So when another that does heating and air conditioning walked into a local pizza joint on a call my nephew wandered into the kitchen. Wonderful. The guy didn’t know how my nephew knew my brother until it was explained. Then you must know ‘Sunny’ – his name for my brother’s ex. I guess his opinion of her isn’t the best.

No weird dreams lately.

I believe this eek I’m currently working is my last before I move back to my old department for the summer. I’ll probably work through Sunday and then start in my new old area on Monday. And I should have my weekends back. YAY! I can sign up here and there for over-time but I expect to skip doing that for a month!

I haven’t done my taxes yet even though I think I should get back around $800. Being single with no dependants I’ve never gotten back more than $800 combined and that was last year the first full year I could claim my house. So it kind of sucks. I made literally just under 40k and I’ll get back under $1000. Just goes to show you that people that say you lose so much in taxes for over-time but get it back at the end of the year are full of shit.

I signed up to do a fun contest called CBR’s Project Runway. It’s a comic book forum’s equivalent to reality tv designer shows where people are booted week to week. I was eliminated in the 5th week last year. I think there were about 12 of us last year. If the people that have said want in actually produce, we’ll have 18 people as of this writing. But usually about ¼ of the people don’t produce a design during the weeks and get eliminated because of it. It was fun last year and it starts the first week of March in believe.

Okay, done now.

Vacation planning

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Feel very fatigued today. Working every weekend is really taking a toll on me. Every other day I wake and just feel utterly exhausted. Yet there’s talk of the area going to 12 hour shifts because only two people out of 15 from second shift show up on Sundays. Sunday is voluntary but it’s also double time. I couldn’t get to sleep again today. I think it was because of a couple of things. I went shopping just after work and it was miserable out. We had a couple of inches of snow and then and half-frozen rain mix to pick a crust on everything. Many roads were flooded and if a large truck passed you your windshield was completely covered with a half-snow, half-frozen rain mix. Again I had more phone calls during the day. Only one or two but it’s the equivalent of getting a phonecall waking one in the middle of the night. And my neighbor used their snowblower and then heavy construction equipment were plowing the roads. In other words, lots and lots of noise like very loud banging (plows) and engine noises. Ugh.

The end isn’t far off though before I’m out of the area. And then I should have my weekends off again. I’m sort of planning of taking a month of weekends off to recover. Then if OT is available I may sign up.

On the plus side of things, I’ve been planning my vacation. Most of this week’s paycheck will go towards it. I’m planning on attending Dragon Con Labor Day weekend. It’s a giant gaming/sci-fi/LARP/comic book/you name it con. It has in excess of 30,000 attendees. I’ve gone twice before and LOVED it. It’s by far my favorite con because there is too much to do. So my plans for the con at this time are to see the parade of costumes on Saturday, play D&D especially the new Living Forgotten Realms campaign, maybe some Living Greyhawk if it’s there which is more D&D, possibly the Cry for Dawn Look-a-like contest, and ramble about the area looking at all the tv stars, comic pro’s, and people peddling their wares.

Edit: Man, Clemens looks guilty as shit!

Patriots miss making sports history. Crap.

Blog 020608

Ugh, my roof KEEPS leaking. And now 3 days of rain. The roof guy said he’d be over – again. Sigh. Hopefully this time he’ll use roofing tar instead of just cocking.

Work continues as always. Work gave us Super Bowl Sunday off or at least said ‘no one’s working’ since they can’t force us to work. So the Patriots up and lose and stall out at 18-1 for the season. Just losing the Super Bowl sucks. But losing and missing a great chance to have only the second perfect season ever in the NFL REALLY sucks. It’s probably not going to happen again in my lifetime. I think I would’ve rooted for just about any team about to have a perfect season because it’s been done once and only once in football. Those guys went 17-0, though. And because the Patriots lost to an 11-6 team, that team will probably be often considered a better team overall because they won the Super Bowl even though the Patriots beat them in the regular season.

It’s a good time for a sports break though. I watch baseball and football and that’s it. Now it’s that lull time as I wait for baseball to start. It’s about 2 months time because I only follow baseball once the regular season starts. I fully expect to join my buddy’s baseball league again this year. I finished 2nd the first year and 3rd last year. Not to shabby.

I saw the movie Cloverfield on Monday. I LOVED it. Except for the motion sickness stuff. It’s a movie about a few friends and how they experience a Godzilla like attack on their city. And it’s all shot from the point of view of this guy carrying a digital video camera. So when he moves the camera shakes like hell and the vantage points move all over. I was glad I saw the movie on an empty stomach because there were a couple of times I really felt ready to hurl. Because of this I probably won’t watch the full movie ever again. But I still loved it. I saw a noon-thirty showing and I was the only one in the theater until about 5 minutes before the start. Then one other guy came in. It’s really relaxing to have pretty much the whole theater to yourself. I sat pretty much right in the middle of the theater. It’s a really good way to watch a movie.

I finished Harry Potter and the Secret Chamber. The movies follow the books fairly closely so there were no surprises for me but I still enjoyed. J.K. Rowling has made a wonderfully fun fantasy world that I think would be great to visit. I bet it could be a really cool multi-person internet role-playing game if someone created one.

I’m now reading The Bride of Frankenstein. This is a new novel based off the characters used in the old Universal monster movie of the same name. It’s seems like it’s just starting to get good after about 80 pages. One thing that’s refreshing is that I have no idea where this book is going. With the Potter or Anita Blake books I know a lot of stuff like there’s more books to come and some later book spoilers. Because of that I can pretty much map out what’s going to happen. Not so with this book.

I’ve been doing a number of sketches recently. These are all from a comic book forum I hang out at. I had asked people if they wanted original characters drawn and about 7 responded. All so far have been pretty happy with what I’ve done unless they are lying and just being nice. I currently have two more to do and they are mostly done. Then I plan on joining a thing called CBR Runway which is a yearly art contest held at the comic book forum I hang out at. In it contestants draw whatever the assignment is which is usually something like ‘redesign Superman’s costume’. Then people vote and the lowest vote getter – or two! – get the boot from the contest. I made it about midway last year. I was always going into the last day of voting at or near the very bottom but usually sneaked through. But drawing a hair legged Wolverine in a costume with short shorts got me booted. LOL!

My sleep got really messed up on Sunday because of the SuperBowl. Basically I was taking catnaps for about 48 hours or more and it finally caught up with me on Monday night. I successfully fought of a migraine before it could take hold. That’s a sure sign that I’m over doing it. I slept for 10 hours yesterday and even then forced myself out of bed to get ready for work. I probably should’ve stayed in bed because I had a miserable first half of the night. The second half wasn’t too bad. Then I went food shopping. It’s awesome that supermarkets and Wal-Mart open at 7am. It’s perfect for me as I drive home. Usually there’s next to nobody in the stores and I’m in and out without any kind of hassle. On occasion one of my supermarkets gets jammed up because there is only one cashier and like 6 people trying to get out. That only happens once a month or less though. So after some grocery shopping I got home and loaded up a load of laundry. I just realized as I’m typing this that I haven’t tossed in it the drier yet! And then I did the trash. And finally, some internet time before reading my new book for an hour before going to sleep. And it’s raining so I expect to get a good sound sleep as the rain taps softly on my roof – and leaks through some of it - grrrr!

Over and out.

Patriots miss making sports history. Crap.

Blog 020608

Ugh, my roof KEEPS leaking. And now 3 days of rain. The roof guy said he’d be over – again. Sigh. Hopefully this time he’ll use roofing tar instead of just cocking.

Work continues as always. Work gave us Super Bowl Sunday off or at least said ‘no one’s working’ since they can’t force us to work. So the Patriots up and lose and stall out at 18-1 for the season. Just losing the Super Bowl sucks. But losing and missing a great chance to have only the second perfect season ever in the NFL REALLY sucks. It’s probably not going to happen again in my lifetime. I think I would’ve rooted for just about any team about to have a perfect season because it’s been done once and only once in football. Those guys went 17-0, though. And because the Patriots lost to an 11-6 team, that team will probably be often considered a better team overall because they won the Super Bowl even though the Patriots beat them in the regular season.

It’s a good time for a sports break though. I watch baseball and football and that’s it. Now it’s that lull time as I wait for baseball to start. It’s about 2 months time because I only follow baseball once the regular season starts. I fully expect to join my buddy’s baseball league again this year. I finished 2nd the first year and 3rd last year. Not to shabby.

I saw the movie Cloverfield on Monday. I LOVED it. Except for the motion sickness stuff. It’s a movie about a few friends and how they experience a Godzilla like attack on their city. And it’s all shot from the point of view of this guy carrying a digital video camera. So when he moves the camera shakes like hell and the vantage points move all over. I was glad I saw the movie on an empty stomach because there were a couple of times I really felt ready to hurl. Because of this I probably won’t watch the full movie ever again. But I still loved it. I saw a noon-thirty showing and I was the only one in the theater until about 5 minutes before the start. Then one other guy came in. It’s really relaxing to have pretty much the whole theater to yourself. I sat pretty much right in the middle of the theater. It’s a really good way to watch a movie.

I finished Harry Potter and the Secret Chamber. The movies follow the books fairly closely so there were no surprises for me but I still enjoyed. J.K. Rowling has made a wonderfully fun fantasy world that I think would be great to visit. I bet it could be a really cool multi-person internet role-playing game if someone created one.

I’m now reading The Bride of Frankenstein. This is a new novel based off the characters used in the old Universal monster movie of the same name. It’s seems like it’s just starting to get good after about 80 pages. One thing that’s refreshing is that I have no idea where this book is going. With the Potter or Anita Blake books I know a lot of stuff like there’s more books to come and some later book spoilers. Because of that I can pretty much map out what’s going to happen. Not so with this book.

I’ve been doing a number of sketches recently. These are all from a comic book forum I hang out at. I had asked people if they wanted original characters drawn and about 7 responded. All so far have been pretty happy with what I’ve done unless they are lying and just being nice. I currently have two more to do and they are mostly done. Then I plan on joining a thing called CBR Runway which is a yearly art contest held at the comic book forum I hang out at. In it contestants draw whatever the assignment is which is usually something like ‘redesign Superman’s costume’. Then people vote and the lowest vote getter – or two! – get the boot from the contest. I made it about midway last year. I was always going into the last day of voting at or near the very bottom but usually sneaked through. But drawing a hair legged Wolverine in a costume with short shorts got me booted. LOL!

My sleep got really messed up on Sunday because of the SuperBowl. Basically I was taking catnaps for about 48 hours or more and it finally caught up with me on Monday night. I successfully fought of a migraine before it could take hold. That’s a sure sign that I’m over doing it. I slept for 10 hours yesterday and even then forced myself out of bed to get ready for work. I probably should’ve stayed in bed because I had a miserable first half of the night. The second half wasn’t too bad. Then I went food shopping. It’s awesome that supermarkets and Wal-Mart open at 7am. It’s perfect for me as I drive home. Usually there’s next to nobody in the stores and I’m in and out without any kind of hassle. On occasion one of my supermarkets gets jammed up because there is only one cashier and like 6 people trying to get out. That only happens once a month or less though. So after some grocery shopping I got home and loaded up a load of laundry. I just realized as I’m typing this that I haven’t tossed in it the drier yet! And then I did the trash. And finally, some internet time before reading my new book for an hour before going to sleep. And it’s raining so I expect to get a good sound sleep as the rain taps softly on my roof – and leaks through some of it - grrrr!

Over and out.