Friendster

I've been feeling a little under the weather the last couple of days... and really unmotivated. I mean, I've been coming to work and doing my usual awesome job (and no, I'm not going to give you clues as to where I work... you think I want to get dooced, like uncle bob just did?)

I left work early yesterday, totally fuzzyheaded and unable to focus. When I got home, there was a Friendster reminder that one of my friends is having her birthday next tuesday.

Oh, poopy, I thought. Now would be an awesome time to update my friendster profile! I was at home, with access to all of our pictures stored on the computer, and I had time to spare.

So I spent a couple of hours doing that.

And guess what? Friendster actually worked! I totally got back in touch with people I haven't seen since high school. I had an hour chat with a guy yesterday that I haven't seen since graduation, I think... he's in NYC and studying to be a dentist. He seemed really excited to hear from me, and caught me up with the goings-on of all these other people whom I've thought of almost not at all in the last 8 years.

wow. It's so great to get back in touch with people you used to be close to.

Make new friends, but keep the old....

Had a great time last night. Sounds dirty, but isn't. Speaking in grunts.

A couple of weeks ago, my aunt called to tell me her friends' nephew was going to be/had possibly already moved to our fair burg, the AusTex. She said he'd be contacting us, at some point.

We rolled our eyes, said "right, some guy's going to call us out of the blue, and I'm sure he won't totally suck."

Guess what? Some guy emailed us out of the blue, and he didn't totally suck! We went to dinner last night at Din Ho, because he wanted Chinese. I think he may have been intimidated a little by all the roasted-ducks-with-heads-on -- as Mr. Pants said, Lew1s (yeah, that's his real name... I dare you to track him down!) wanted chinese, and we thought he meant Chinese, but he seemed to like it.

Then we drove over to get 40 or so ounces of beer at the Dog and Duck. (Yum to Guinness and Fat Tire!) He's still relatively new to town (has only been here three weeks) so it's neat to see everything being so new to him. I think I'm pretty jaded on Austin (says the girl who's never been to Barton Springs), so it's fun to have someone new to show around.

Plus, it'll be fun to have someone to call to hang out with. You gotta have a list of those people!

/end fangirl.

Yo!

I haven't really had much to say this week, to be honest. I've just been working, wearing as many hats as they choose to give me (metaphorically, dumbass) and trying to get to bed as early as possible.

We watched a teriffic show on TNT -- Morgan Spurlock's (Super Size Me) got a weekly documentary show that started this week called 30 days. The show's idea was to put people into strange situations for 30 days, to see what they learn.

This first show was a sort of "How the Other Half Lives", in which Morgan and his fiancee try to live for a month on minimum wage. I think what struck me the most is, as pointed out in an article in Salon, that it's really expensive to be poor! Morgan had to pay a deposit for his electricity and they had two medical emergencies that necessitated hospital bills (with no insurance, that can be extremely costly). The middle class is normally shielded from expenses like this.

There were a couple of things I felt were kind of "off", however... One, the jobs they got actually paid more than minimum wage. They were closer to $7/hour -- so it's not really representative of people only making $5.15. Secondly, though they did buy a bus pass and shop at the free store, there were at least a couple things we saw them doing that seemed like flagrant wastes of money-- i.e. buying bottled water at least twice and buying candy at the movie theater (talk about a rip-off!). Third, Morgan injured his wrist at work and went to the emergency room -- it seems like there would have been some kind of worker's comp doctor he could have visited.

Of course, these are minor nitpicks... the point, to me, is really that you can tell a lot about a society by looking at how they treat their weakest members, and we treat our weakest members pretty shabbily. Secondary point? Gawd, does our health care system suck! In Morgan's case, they were charged $550 just to walk through the door at the emergency room... which hardly seems fair. You can't save that kind of money very easily at $7/hour... much less $5.15. Makes my nitpick about spending money at the theater pretty silly.

The show actually made me think... and I appreciate it when tv does that for me. After it was over, I looked around our comfortable living room, couches and tables and television and vcr and all, and felt very, very lucky. We were extremely lucky to be born not only at the time we were, but into the families we were... and sometimes I think we forget that.

I mean, that we can even TALK about moving to Italy for Mr. Pants to go to culinary school? That would be so, so ridiculously out of reach for so many people. It's going to be a struggle for us, but we'll be able to pull it off. Dang. We always have to remember just how fortunate we actually are.

I can't think of a way to wrap this up, so I think I'll just stop typing. Kinda the conclusion I always got yelled at for in high school.

Title goes here. Or not. I think.

We rented the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou last night. I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson/Owen Wilson movies, and I did think this one was good. BUT, it felt a lot less accessible than Rushmore to me.

Dan Aykroyd was great, through. (Ha! I knew that was Bill Murray! Just yankin’ yr chain, folks.) And Owen was good, as usual in these movies. It did have that same strange feeling of disconnect that the rest of their movies have... like you’re watching, but you’re not sure if you care about the characters and what’s happening to them, but then you realize you do care, if only because they’re so clueless, but then something bad happens to them and you’re like, “So?” but you think about it a little more and you get all sad.

Or something.

I’m a little out of it right now... my boss, the head-of-the-department boss, is quitting effective tomorrow to leave for a much more lucrative job, so we took her out for lunch today to Eastside Café. I had a nice time, though I clammed up around the largish group the way I always tend to. I had a giant-ass tuna sandwich, which was good but not great. I think I didn’t like it so much because the tuna was all cooked and stuff, and while some people may like their tuna that weird grayish hue, I prefer the deep ruby red of a beautiful piece of sashimi.

Where was I? Yes! So we went out to eat much earlier than I usually do (like 11:15!) and now I’m sleepy like I normally get closer to 7. But I don’t want any coffee because it’s been giving me strange tummy pains (I think). whoop.

I promised you yesterday the story of the lovable yet bumbling copy center guy, yes? Sounds like the setup for a really stupid sitcom that somehow reaches #1 for like 17 years and NEVER goes away until finally it gets just a little too bloated for its own good (I’m looking at YOU, Raymond!).

We bought 100 sheets of paper that we wanted turned into a fold-over agenda, like so:

Okay, my pretty picture I drew isn't working. Bastard. It's just a 8.5/11 sheet of paper, with pretty silver foil across the top, which we wanted to fold in half so the top met the bottom. On the front, we'd have some lettering, and then on the inside, we'd have the agenda. So, you have to print the outside upside-down, from the point of view of the inside. Capice?

Anyway.

First ( I assume) copyguy tries to set up the printer so it will print the whole thing, both sides (with opposite orientations) at the same time, without having to flip the paper himself so that the pretty foil top is in the correct position.

He manages to screw up 50 (yes, that’s HALF) of the paper sheets the first time through. Yup, prints 50 without checking to see if he's set the damn thing up right. Woot!

So, now he has to go the megaofficesupplymart to get more paper. I let him know where it is. 30 minutes later, he calls from far, far north of town to say he must have missed it, and where is it again? (He goes about 20 miles out of his way, all told.) I get him turned around and heading the right direction. He makes it back with the paper, whereupon he manages to print some wack-ass form on ALL of them, this time....

So, he has to go back to the store to get more of the pretty foil-top paper.

When he gets back, my boss takes the paper from him and gives it to me to run the copy job on our clinkety-clank teeny copier. It works, so we have the agenda for our dinner (that nobody shows up for anyway, as I said yesterday).

OK, that’s totally it for today. Please forgive me the abrupt ending. Kisses!

Whoooossssshhhh

It's been a bit of a hectic week 'round here.

First off, on Friday (after this meeting I mentioned last week) I'm told that my new responsibility is to take calls for the Executive Director... not be his secretary, just take his calls. The unfortunate thing here is that I've finally gotten to the point in my job as a dept. secretary that I know what to do when people call us about 80 percent of the time. Taking the exec. director's calls? Oh, about 3% of the time I know what to do... the other 97% I've just got to pass it back to his actual secretary. So, basically, once again I look like an idjit.

Secondly, my boss (the department head) calls me into her office late Monday and tells me that she's leaving the organization because she got a better job elsewhere. I'm happy for her, I totally am, but again the organization isn't hiring anyone to replace her. You already know why this sucks-- my other boss is moving up in the world (again, good for her) but the workload on me is probably going to increase... again... along with answering the exec. director's calls.

Third and last for now, because I do know this is boring, trust me... I'm going all out to bore the crap out of you, so you're just going to have to tell me if it's working... is that last night my department held a celebratory dinner for people who participated in this series of seminars (now completed). When we sent out the invites, we expected ~300 to rsvp. We had 75 tell us they were going to be there.

This means the hotel charges a hefty fee, since it's a lot fewer than they were banking on. Understandable.

But then, half of the people who rsvpd don't show. So, that's about 40 $46 dinners down the drain. Jackholes. Plus the speaker, who in his defense was very interesting, went way over his allotted time. I was supposed to be able to leave at 8:30... it was actually 9:30 when I got out of there, so I got to go right home and go straight to bed, pretty much. Because I am a PARTY ANIMAL, I stayed up until 10:30.

That's enough to bore you with right now. Perhaps tomorrow I will tell you the story of the sweet, but idiotic mailroom guy who is absolutely unable to print a two-sided agenda which has to be folded in half.

Go Dan! Go Steve!

Another great weekend... much visiting of farmer's markets, viewing the third installment of an increasingly bloated trilogy (as Douglas Adams would have said -- and by the way, did everyone have a good Towel Day?), eating of cattle parts with men of cattle (cattle-men?) outside of Luling, TX (don't ask) and watching of the tee-vee, as is our wont.
There’s been a show that the Food Network (our network of choice around the Pants household) has been hyping since Sisyphus first started heaving that rock called “The Next Food Network Star.” Of course, the term “star” has to be applied pretty loosely in this sense... FN doesn’t really churn out phenoms like, say, American Idol does. While I might squeee on seeing, say, Alton Brown shopping at our local megalomart, I don’t know if he’s a star on the same level as Michael Jackson. And a good thing, too.
So, we turn on this relentlessly hyped whore of a show last night, and the first installment is the choosing of the contestants. One contestant (actually two people, competing as one, unlike the rest of the group who are one competing as one) looks awfully familiar... and the name is familiar, too. A couple, named Dan and Steve, who’ve been catering for 7 years. I turn to Mr. Pants. “Is this ringing a bell with you, too?” Then, the show goes a little more in depth, telling us that these guys have a business in sunny Chicago, Illinois.
Man, you could have knocked me over with a feather. A very heavy feather, probably made of large rocks, but a feather nonetheless... these guys are the masterminds behind the Hearty Boys, the awesome catering gurus who catered our wedding last year in Chicago!
So, now we actually have a reality show we have to watch that we really have a sort of vested interest in. I’ve never been in this situation before. They weren’t the first guys kicked off, so yay so far! I’ll keep you updated.

hiddly dinky dinky dink, spiddly dinky doo.

It's been a while... in my defense, we were hella busy last weekend and then work this week has been wicked stoopid, and it's just been too much... wah, wah.
Had a great weekend with the inlawpantsers. Tried out new restaruants, went to see the Producers (loved, loved, loved), did a lotta shopping, and only fielded 327 questions from mr. inlawpants about when we're having a baby, shoudn't we be buying a house for the certainly-soon-to-be-here baby, have I given any thought to when my uterus might start to wither, et cetera. Sigh. And this was him being good about the level of questioning.
I made him pledge right after the wedding that he would give us one year before he started asking about bebes all the damn time... he didn't really stick with it, but that isn't stopping him from triumphantly crowing now that the year is over that he is, once more, free to ask thinly veiled questions about our sex life. Yurhghgh!
You'd think that the arrival of the nephlet would have sated his bebeappetite for a little while... but now, everyone (not just daddyinlaw.. also the bro-in-law and the fee-yawn-say) is asking us to provide a playmate for him.

I say, just enroll the kid in a baby networking program, but I guess that isn't good enough.

On an entirely unrelated note, we're having an all-staff meeting today at Workplace (tm Sundry -- I know I'm a thief, many apologies) to discuss the new assignment of duties since one girl who was doing the work of two left for a new job and TPTB are refusing to hire a new person to take over her duties. They're just going to redistribute it all. Everyone here had to fill out a checklist last week including everything we do all day and everything we've done in the last year (which is tough, as I've only been here 6 months) and turn it in to be analyzed.
I'm sure I'm about to get absolutely loaded down. I've already taken on a project from one person who's leaving that takes about an hour and a half at the beginning of each day to complete, and now I betcha I get at least one new ongoing project.

It's so great to have a job.