Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

The problems with the comp turned out to be:

A bunch of dust, and the bearings are starting to go in the fan for the power supply. I'm ordering a replacement for the power supply, but I think we're going with "hang onto the part until the power supply actually quits" since, according to the nice guy from Geek Housecalls who came last night, I might have another six months to a year on the power supply.

Had to work a long shift this morning and I'm a bit tired. Not sure how much I'll get done on the NaNo today, and while I'm a week ahead on my word count, I really don't want to fall behind since they want me to come in at nine on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week. In theory, if I can keep up the momentum I've had most of this month, I may be able to finish my word count by this coming Sunday. I did manage to scribble down a couple hundred words while I was on my lunch break.

Had to work an afternoon shift today: and Fridays in a grocery store can be like one of the outer rings of Dante's Inferno. Gaah...

Also, a note to Fanfiction.net: Please stop accepting malware in your advertising. Thank you.

At least AVG caught the bug before it could do any damage, but it's ticking me off, as I was in the middle of reading a very funny yet touching and surprisingly IC alternate take on Episode 20 of Evangelion: in this case, Shinji re-emerges from Unit 01... as a *baby* and Misato has to knuckle down and get more serious about being a guardian... with some help from Rei, who proves she might just have some memories left over from her genetic template...

I'm on call for work tomorrow, so good news and bad news: I may get called in so I can score more hours, but that means I have to stick close to home.

Also had to deal with bagging for "Wanda the Whiner" first thing this morning: my God, she sounds like a thirteen year old girl sometimes. Clinical depression aside, I swear, a person is only as happy as they decide to be, and she is one of those cases. If she isn't having a bad day, she finds a reason to. Fortunately "Mick" the supervisor found me someone else to bag for, plus it was quiet and I ended up doing overstock for most of the shift.

Lack of writing motivation: I have maybe a handful of paragraphs left for the second of my two 31_days Amnesty Day fics, but I cannot seem to get myself into the right frame of mind. Might be because this chapter ties into the dreaded Episode 22, aka the mind-rape set to Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus". I've rewatched the episode twice this week and I'm still having trouble finishing this damn thing. It's not for lack of motivation, I guess it's because this is such a grueling segment to deal with. Heaven help us, I've gone over it so many times, I am almost starting to not just feel bad for "that little red-haired girl", but also feel some of the mental anguish she endures. (No, I don't like Asuka: I've come to an understanding of her, but I still really don't like her. That's one reason she's been glaringly absent from Neon Enoch Evangelion, the main reason being, Sabia really doesn't cross paths with the Eva pilots much.)

So I've been digging around looking for Evangelion tchotchkes I may or may not buy: found a NERV logo coffee mug which would look snazzy on my desk. Also found a NERV logo journal, which would be perfect as a project bible for "NEE", though I found a quicker and dirtier way to make a journal: just print out the "PROPERTY OF NERV" logo in this journal entry and slap it onto a plain ol' notebook. I'm tempted to make a mock-up of Sabia's personal journal using this.

My sinuses are utterly haywire, due to the fact that we've barely had any rain all month (and May is generally the monsoon season here), and thus the pollen isn't getting washed out of the air. Thus, I've been miserable the past few days: sneezing, sniffling, my eyes sore and running, my sinuses swollen. Not a pretty picture. Add to this, I've barely been able to sleep, due to all of the above. Yes, I took some Zyrtec. It just seems it's not designed for abominable weather conditions.

The kicker? the whiners at work have been whining about "all this wretched rain". Every time even the smallest cloud passes over the sun, they start whimpering, "oh noez, its going 2 RAIN!!1111". Are they all made out of the same stuff as the Wicked Witch of the West in "the Wizard of Oz" and they'll melt if they get wet? I almost wish they would so I don't have to listen to them and so they'll be put put out of their misery.

Inventory night, and I think I need a break from work. The question is, if I can afford it. Money isn't much of an issue, as much as my sanity is. And frankly, the environment at work is toxic. People lately, co-workers and customers alike, seem whinier than ever, and I really am tired of hearing about everything that's wrong in the universe, when I have enough of my own darkness to deal with. When I just want to hear about something good and uplifting. I come home from work feeling like I've been crawling through raw sewage. A fall of snow can give me reasons to be joyful, but that joy is soon destroyed under a barrage of howling from people who seem to have forgotten that childhood feeling of glee...

I don't feel like I'm meant for this world, and I wish I could find one where I fit...

But I have one thing to be happy about: My draggies hatched in the night!

|| || || ||

I honestly hope I either die young and painlessly, or that 2012 really is the end of the world (My luck it winds up looking like the Instrumentality sequence in End of Evangelion. :: Gases up the motorboat to run it across the sea of LCL...:: [Yes, currently rewatching Evangelion, due to an attack of the killer Eva plot bunnies of doom])

First customer of Thanksgiving Insanity 2008 was a "Mrs. Tolliver", ie. what I call those evil nit-picky old ladies, who then went whining to management about a bagging job that I screwed up. How the hell am I supposed to know what the frig the old bat mumbled at me when there's registers beeping/people talking/babies crying all around me, and I have Sensory Integration Problems?! I can't hear an old lady mumbling her orders on how her friggin' bags are supposed to be bagged over all that racket.

:: Growls::

...Oddly enough, the heead-in-a-vise feeling happens either when I'm at work or when my mother is yattering at me, thus this has been leading to more than the usual computer-room dwelling.

SUNDAY: Inventory night, and thankfully for the third time in a row, I didn't have to help inventory the freezer cases. One of the teenaged chickies who insist on wearing boobie blouses in the dead of winter had to. Instead, I was inventorying about twenty feet of the pasta sauce aisle (which went like the proverbial well-oiled machine, since I was with a group of well-organized people) and about four feet of the canned vegetable aisle (which took longer because I was working with teenagers who kept bickering over who was counting what).

YESTERDAY: I think I'm fighting the cold my mother has, so I ended up calling in sick. Usually, she yatters at me for not sleeping enough, today she yattered at me for sleeping too much. I can't win.

TODAY: Tried working on some writing, but I kept getting interrupted by my mother bugging me. Any ideas how to keep her from bothering me when I'm trying to write, and then explain to her why I can't get stuff done, after she kept bugging me? Locking the door to my room, putting on AC/DC to near-blasting levels, notes on the door, nothing seems to work. Now I know why Neil Gaiman has a writing cabin he retreats to when he's working...

Thanks to a bagging frame falling right on my toes. Owch. I'll be taking it easy the rest of the day. :: Limps away from the keyboard::

"Phuong", my supervisor at work, convieniently forget to send me home until I'd been there an hour more than I was scheduled for -- I wonder if he convieniently forgot on purpose...

Also, he and "Lola", one of the assistants, shook down this week's schedule and found five and a half more hours for me. This will definately help my situation: not sure how soon it'll rebalance my budget. I'm still going to suspend my MxO account at least for next month.

Little bit of sad fannish news: The new episodes of "Supernatural" won't be airing till October (good time of the year for it, though). And I've heard that "Law & Order" won't start up till January, 2008. Strange.

Not the real name of the store where I work, and apologies for the mangled paraphrase of a quote from "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure".

Thankfully it was the Major's day off, so I had a reprieve from his obnoxiousness for one day. I just have to put up with him the rest of the week.

More delights from him: He's doing away with the notebook we were jotting down our requests for days off. If we want a day off, we have to go directly to him and ask him. I don't even like talking to this jerk since he consistently talks down to me, like I'm a teenager, when for God's sake I'm turning freakin' *30* in five days, dangit!.

Also, he's been grilling people on what they're doing on their days off when they consistently turn down his demands that they come in on said days off. I'm looking for a few good suggestions for things to say to this guy in the event that he tries getting me over a barrel like this.

In better news -- well, funnier anyway... we don't what was going on, but about two this afternoon, two guys in their late teens/early twenties pulled up in front of the building in a convertible with the top down, took a big blanket out of the back seat of the car, spread the blanket on the ground and then started *dancing* on the blanket for about three or four minutes. Long enough for everyone in the front end to turn and stare at them, through the window. Then they picked up the blanket, tossed it back into the car, got in the front seat and sped away. We're not sure what that was about. If this was September, I'd think it was some sort of bizarre initiation ritual for a fraternity at one of the local colleges.