Holy Hannah, I've been busy...

Y'know, after being off work since the afternoon o/Christmas Eve, it's taking some serious work to really get back into the swing of things. I'm having a really awful time concentrating on anything today & it's a struggle not to roam the internet. I'm compromising by running an industrial Pandora channel in the background and typing this entry up in Notepad during breaks from today’s tasks.

My holiday time off was actually *way* more social than I originally planned, which was fantastic. I spent very little time @ the apt., returning briefly to do laundry or grab something before going back out again. Stayed w/the folks Christmas Eve & Christmas Night, then headed back to the apt.on the 26th. I was supposed to hit one or more of three Christmas parties to which I'd been invited, but for some reason I was feeling kind of off-kilter so I didn’t follow up on either. Had it not been for Michael's unrelenting insistence that I get over to the ALL Tower & hang out w/the crew for once, I'd have likely just stayed home & watched movies 'til I crashed, but I listened to him & ended up having a really good time & feeling better as a result.

Sat.night I just stayed in, apparently the *same* night that everyone else on the planet decided to head out to Spellbound that evening. ::chuckles:: I guess it was a shame I didn't know about it, but honestly I was perfectly happy to just go home, fall over, curl up & sleep that night b/c I was exhausted.

Sunday I hit the folks' house, helped my Mom, then went to Katiedid's where we stayed up *far* too late making 2 mammoth vats of stew while bouncing around the kitchen being rowdy & ridiculous to industrial and hair metal. I was supposed to stay the night in Rockville, but about 6:30a I got a call from Pat. The poor guy'd accidentally locked himself out o/the apt.& no one else w/a spare key was in town, so I jetted (have to remember to get a few things back from Katie's house) & headed back to let him in just before he headed out to work.

Tuesday I went to Hampton w/Katie & Nicholas to visit their friend Johnny & hit up a club. I haven't had that much fun at a club in forever (it's held @ Wave on Wednesdays for anyone reading this). The turnout was full, the dance floor was never mostly empty, the music was good & most importantly it didn't seem that anyone really had much of an attitude about club status/popularity/whatever-the-Hell, etc. The crowd was comprised of a *lot* of new blood, there were all kinds of diff.people enjoying the Hell out o/themselves on the dance floor and I didn't really notice any of the disdainful looks being flung one way or the other that's a bit more obvious in other scenes. It was a great time and I'd love to go back.

Party at Johnny's after the club, crashed out around ??? o'clock, then packed up & headed back to No.VA the next day after a quick stop at Waffle House (hash browns!). Went to Kohl's for my first time on the way back, met Nicholas's parents (they're great & make me want to make them food of some sort), then back to Reston. Showered, changed, then back out to the ALL Tower w/Katie, Nicholas & Dave to hang out for a bit before returning to Reston for movies & pajamas. Good stuff.

Last night no one was really feelin' like wings, so Nicholas, Katie & I decided to see 'Gran Torino' instead, meeting up w/Dave beforehand. I loved this film. I really like Clint Eastwood, always have, but the film itself was fantastic in so many ways and I think there were some pertinent facets of this movie that weren't necessarily advertised as strongly as others. It made me laugh, it made me tear up, it made me slap my hands over my mouth & my eyes but out in shock. I don't really want to go into more detail about it at the moment, so I'll simply say I seriously recommend it.

After the movie we were hungry as Hell, so off to the 24hr.Korean BBQ in Annandale. Sushi wasn't available (damn!) but the food we got was pretty damned good. I got the Jap Chae (basically sliced beef w/sauteed vegetables over glass noodles) w/boiled dumplings as an appetizer and there was NO way I could finish everything, not even close. Everyone seemed to like what they got & went home full & happy.

So that was my holiday! Good times for everyone & far too much food. I'm actually making a New Year's resolution this year (I never bother with these usually) to join a freakin' gym & ACTUALLY GO. I'm tired of feeling blech about my physical appearance b/c I weigh too much and I want to actually do something about it. Plus, even though getting into an exercise routine is difficult for me, I *always* feel better once I've started, so my goal is to've decided on a fitting membership by the end o/Jan. I think I can do that. I'd also like to look into yoga. :)

That’s all for now. More later.

~E.

Obviously there are at least a few things that are very wrong with me...

All right, so apparently nonsensical, downright off-kilter crap is not only contagious, but practically genetic/familial BECAUSE this time I did not find the following gems on my own. These "treasures" were actually brought to my attention by the youngest of my four siblings (Peej being 19 & Kell @ 14) very, very late on Christmas night. I cannot possibly express (without video documentation) how gleefully proud they were of themselves when they found these & thought to present them to me, sneaking downstairs far after both their bedtimes to make me watch them, having a good idea how much I'd pretty much hurt myself laughing at the bloody things, not because the following videos are that fantastic but because they made NO FREAKIN' SENSE in such a manner that they knew I'd crack right the Hell up going, "WHAT THE F$#&?!" and crying a little on the inside.

Part of me is really very proud of the two of them for being so young & yet having such a collaborative knack for finding something strangely comical that suits any one, odd individual so perfectly. The other part of me is rather a bit ashamed of myself for having assisted in raising them (at least during their formative years when Mom & Dad were both working full-time) as if they are from freakin' space, thinking this kind of shit is hilarious because now they'll have to find their own crew of ...(ahem)...loving, caring people whose fingers won't immediately itch for indelible ink & the commitment papers when one giggles endlessly @ such ricockulousness wonderfully "accepting" friends, which are not easy to come by.

I've all ready subjected the residents of the ALL Tower to this nonsense and followed it swiftly earlier this morning by hurting poor Katiedid's brain a little when I asked her to watch all three. (She was really very kind about it, but I think only because she's a very nice person & I made her a vat of the stew she loves so much beforehand.)

All this said, there are curse words & NSFW aplenty throughout two of the three following ("Dr Tran's Quiet Log Time" is really the only safe-for-work one & the shortest, for that matter), though I did make sure I listed the censored version of the first video. (By the way, in case you can't hear/understand everything in the first video, being "The Furious Little Cinnamon Bun", do wait for the sum-up just after the first roll of the credits.)

Also, if anything is considered that F'd & weird, you may chalk it up to my YouTube revenge on Debbar for posting that FROM HELL video of Jr. Sr. & the teat-suckling which I shall NEVER be able to scrub from my brain, even with bleach and fire GOD HELP ME. (Madam, I love ya, but really all of space.)

The Furious Little Cinnamon Bun



Dr. Tran's Quiet Log Time



Dr. Tran - Here Come Dr. Tran!



More later (God help you).

~E.

Damnation...

So I just bought my ticket to see The Damned this evening after talking to Nicholas & Katie about it last week, then Bev & Sean about it last night. 'Bout 2 hours later (since I arranged mine should be "Will Call") I go back to check the site for a couple details & find the following...

Oh no! :( Well *that* just blows goats.

More later.

~E.

Hm...

Got a few different options for socializing this evening but think I may stay in after all, not sure yet. Not feelin' quite the thing but I'll see how the rest of the day goes.

Christmas with the family was lovely & it was nice seeing everyone in one place for more than just a couple hours. It's harder these days to see the older of my siblings since they both have crazy schedules between Bri's school & bartending and Kev's theatre tours. It'd be nice to figure out a way to keep in touch with them on a more regular basis. Maybe that'll be something I can work on in the new year.

I hope everyone's had a lovely holiday thus far. :) Now I'm off to take care of some dishes & such.

More later.

~E.

Oh yes, this...

Cross-postin' like a mo-fo for anyone who may not have the pleasure of a Debbar on their friends list, 'cuz it's fucking hilarious.



Because BlogSpot is a bit of a bastard & only permits the tiniest versions of pictures embedded among text, you can check out the normal-size version over here.

:D

More later.

~E.

Oh shit, dude, Bettie Page!

I just found out that apparently Bettie Page passed away after today after suffering a heart attack. She was 85.

:( Well damnation. Man, we've lost a lot of keen &/or interesting celebrities this year.

Okay, so I'm a little immature sometimes, but really...

Today I've spent most of my day working out conflicting travel arrangements, flights, cars, and all sorts of extra crap in addition to my pre-scheduled routine for the day. No big, really, it keeps me busy & I'm prioritizing. While I was booking a National car rental for my boss's stay over in Hawaii, however, something caught my eye during a booking and prompted me to backstep on the site, make sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me, then I started giggling, because apparently I am 12:


The image is a bit clearer if you click on this link.

...hee hee hee.

More later.

~E.

“...an’ what’s mos’ importantly, I ain’t gotta fuck wit’ Ray-Ray’s broke ass no’ mo’...”

Here’s to being gainfully employed. Dude, one of the things about being w/out a steady job for an unHOLY and fully unacceptable period of time (temping most certainly does not count, particularly in this economy) is that even if you do not have any money of which to speak yet, you are excited simply about the upcoming check, even if the first check is only for a few days and still isn’t due for a little bit yet. You still know that it is coming. One needs no longer fuck about mit das Gub’ment for unemployment payouts weekly to obtain the barest means of covering one’s car insurance, gas, any other bill you can sort of squeeze in there and the weekly ration of ramen, frozen veggies and tuna that become creative “casseroles”. Man, it’s a relief. I remember telling someone a while ago that I really missed being able to bitch about my day at the job. Know why? Because doing so is a luxury. It usually means your job isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and you need to vent before going in for another day of work, because it will all be there again for you tomorrow. Correct me if I’m wrong, but people who are sincerely concerned about the stability of their positions don’t bitch so much. They talk about it a lot and they freak out, but all in all they’re too worried about what’s going to happen tomorrow because they don’t know what’s going to happen next. I think for the most part, people who are sincerely concerned don’t bitch. They stress, they get headaches, they obsess, they smoke and/or drink too much, all while on the lookout for a new position. People who are secure enough in their positions bitch because they know they can and still go in the next day. Random thought, there.

Yesterday I left the apt.about 7:20a to get to work. Had one HELL of a long day. Y’know the kind, just one thing after another and even if you wrote everything down that you did all day long, it still doesn’t seem to justify all the time you just spent in the office. Spent a good chunk of the day reprioritizing everyone’s “emergency” projects while calling all over the better part of the eastern seaboard in order to track down all the missing receipts I needed to process the thick stack of expense reports I wanted off my desk with a passion. Right near the end of the time I’m actually supposed to leave the office (4:30p), the president of the company comes up, tells me he needs last-minute reservations for one o/our guys to go to San Diego next week at a reasonable rate (oh, Lord) and that Duder needs an aisle seat and whatever non-stop flights might be available. (This was a difficult task.) In the end I did what I could, finally calling it quits around 9p (yup, that’s another 12hr.day, hooray for OT!), but with a lock on a decent fare, though not quite the right schedule, and only a few expense reports to tackle today. ::sighs:: Hopefully that’ll be enough to work with for the time being.

For the most part I’m getting my body used to a fairly normal sleep schedule, being about 5 to 6 hrs., depending. I usually get up somewhere between 5a & 6:30a now, depending on whether or not I can afford to sleep in a little. Last night was rough, though. Even going directly home, dropping my bags, changing into pajamas, curling up under warm blankets & watching ‘Tropic Thunder’ I couldn’t seem to get to sleep. Maddening, that. You know damned well you’ve little time left to sleep before you get up, and your mind’s obsessively workin’ the countdown every time you check the nearest timepiece re:how much more time you’ve just lost thinking about it, but you still can’t force yourself to crash out. Urgh. ::sighs again:: I finally decided to just type this entry out, have the last New Castle I’d stashed in the fridge a couple wks.ago & smoke a little before trying again. Eventually it worked, I just wish it’d worked a little earlier. Luckily I am not a surgeon of any sort, so no one shall die or become disfigured even a little on my watch today...they might just end up w/an unexplained über-order of colored Post-Its and rubber bands when next we receive supplies. :)

All right, I’m off to my previously scheduled tasks for the day, but before I finish up do me a favor at some point today, even just for a second or two. Some people reading this have jobs they really dig, some have ones they don’t love but will more than do for the time being, and some people have jobs that blow goats and make them want to drink heavily even before leaving the cube farm behind for the day. Just take a second, though, and remember that no matter how freakin’ frustrating that shit might be at any given moment, you actually *have* a job. It may not be much to speak of, and you might even curse it every day you go in, but you actually HAVE employment. The economy’s fucked, unemployment’s at an all-time high, and honestly even if you’re moppin’ up Slurpie guts and switching out that 5lb.chili bag right now you have *something*, which is one Hell of a lot more than a lot of other people have right now. Just think about that for a brief second at some point today before shoving another pin in the rubber band voodoo doll you made of your boss or co-worker last week. Could be worse.

...then shove another pin in near the head, ‘cuz that guy should *really* learn to chew with his mouth closed. I mean really.

:)

More later.

~E.

When advertisements attack!

All right, so all the guys are back from the Con today, which means I'm not going to have time for a full-fledged entry when everyone's likely to read it. Instead, I'm making another one of my picture entries. See I've all ready received a few texts/IMs today, one of which was a reference from Nicholas to an abandoned jar of peanut butter in the hallway of his work, which he suspected of being a trap, which then reminded me of bear traps, which of course brought to mind bears and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to...

BEARS WITH CHAIRS!!!


Dun dun DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!


I saw this lovely display, which is apparently used to advertise a business called "Bare Woods" (yes, that's the correct spelling) while driving around yesterday during my lunch break. From what I can tell, the bear seems to've been sculpted out of rather pointy pieces of metal that have since rusted, which basically makes it a giant Tetanus Bear. Also, if you look closely, you will note that both the bear AND the chairs have been chained down...for safety. If the bear doesn't get you, the chairs will for damn certain.

Now I go back to expense reports.

More later.

~E.

Please allow me to adjust my pants, so that I may dance the good time dance...

In case you were wondering, I've been listening to a lot of Clutch in the past few days, specifically 'Blast Tyrant', 'Beale Street' and 'Robot Hive/Exodus'. Day before yest., "The Mob Goes Wild" got stuck in my head for no reason & wouldn't leave, so I've been playing the band since (interspersed with various bits of punk and faster-paced indie) while driving around and running work errands.

Things've been busy as Hell in the past several weeks, which is great but hasn't given me a lot of time to catch up w/people I haven't talked to in awhile. I've started a new job doing admin.& operations work (similar tasks to my last job) with an engineering company over in Chantilly that designs and builds flight simulators for the Navy & USMC. It's a smaller company with the HQ in Chantilly and three other offices in Jacksonville (NC), Orlando, and one that's basically just a guy in CA working from home with occasional outside help. They’ve pretty keen benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO, etc.) that started 12/1 for me, which is fantastic considering I’ve not even been here a full mo.yet & I been w/out for almost a year. The pay's not bad either (or won’t be once I get my first check) and my supervisor seems to be pretty nice so far.

The keen thing about starting here around this time of year is two-fold. First, there are a lot of company holidays right now, like the 4-day weekend I got for Thanksgiving right after starting, then being off from 12/25 - 1/1 for Christmas. (Sweet!) Second, there's not really anyone in the office at the moment. See, right around this time of year, every year, there's a big convention down in Orlando called IITSEC where all the owners of the co.(and a good number of our engineers) go to promote what we do, which means that for about 4 or 5 days straight there are very few people in my office.

When I'm starting in a new place, something like this is freakin' fantastic. I get almost a full week to put in as much OT as I like while I overhaul whatever space I'm working in, reorganizing everything to suit me, and starting on personal projects and initiatives I'd like to get going in the office while everyone's away. In short, I'm not interrupted often (unless the guys call from the Con, which does happen sometimes) and I can work on WHATEVER.I.WANT. Love. Also, though I've made sure to keep her updated on whatever I'm doing, my supervisor seems to trust me thus far to find something useful to do and get things together, pretty much leaving me to my own devices, which is ALSO something I appreciate more than I can say in a workplace. (I despise micromanagement and have never understood the thought process behind it.) She goes for a couple of hours at a time w/out coming by or calling at all, so I’m able to get a jump on things I normally might not be able to touch if I were constantly interrupted. Hopefully this won't change completely when the guys come back tomorrow/Monday.

There are some other nice things about this place, too: Being able to listen to music (though at a low level) on speakers by my comp., even when I'm covering phones; the insistence that even if we choose not to take a break away from the office ea.day, we at least step away from our work & do something on the internet for a little bit so we don't get cranky and stressed; and getting mileage reimbursement for any work errands we do (which is not nearly as common as you'd think). All in all, not bad thus far. We'll see how things progress.

Aside from that this weekend should be nice. Tonight is wings for the first time in forever (provided it's happening this evening), Friday I'm celebrating a friend's birthday and Saturday I'm to head to a third Thanksgiving gathering, which should be pretty keen. No clue what else I might be doing, but it’ll probably be local as I’m not getting my first paycheck for a bit yet. If you’ve any ideas, hit me up.

More later.

~E.