politics and mundanities

_{(Is "mundanities" a word? I don't think it is. Ah well.)}

So, summer is swiftly drawing to a close, and I find myself in the midst of various upheavals, as usual. Ah well. Here's what's going on lately, in no particular order:

-I was on TV tonight! Our Representative, Dan Burton (R-IN), held a town hall meeting about the proposed healthcare legislation, so of course I had to go and speak my piece, and on channel 15's 11:00 news, they showed me up at the microphone asking my question. It was very exciting, if I do say so myself, and I do.

-Summer jobs are winding down. I've been done with Stride Rite for a few weeks now (oh, it is nice), and tonight was my last night at Pizza Hut for the summer. I took on cleaning my mom's church again, basically for just this month until she could find somebody new, because the people she hired last year quit, and next week will be the last week for that. Yeah, I worked a lot this summer.

-My brother is officially a middle schooler now. He started 6th grade on Monday. He seems to like it so far. Mom's sending him to a little private K-12 school in Fort Wayne, and it seems like a really good place; I'm glad for him.

-My cousin has moved in with us. She's fifteen, and through a long series of events, she ended up going to the same school as Michael, and needing a place to stay, so I volunteered my room (since I'm leaving for school in less than two weeks anyway). Of course, that meant I had to clean my room (all my junk was just kind of lying in there; I've been sleeping on the couch all summer), but that's finally done, and as soon as I get all my crap packed up for school, the house will finally be more or less de-cluttered.

-Another cousin of mine is having a get-together this weekend at his lake house in Michigan. I am rather psyched. It sounds like it might be kind of cold for lake antics, but there will still be campfire doings and game playing and the like. It will be mad good times. And a canoe trip! Mustn't forget the canoe trip. :D

-And of course, most importantly, 12 days until Knox!

I'm living for the weekend. Really.

So, I'm really glad I've got a job and all. It's nice to have income. And beggars certainly can't be choosers. But I can't say I'm sorry it's just for the summer. Working in a warehouse is not an enjoyable activity. Mostly what I do is picking, which means I get a list of pairs of shoes and where they are, go find them, and put them on a cart to be packed. It's really monotous, but you have to pay attention to a whole bunch of numbers at once (location, how many of each pair you need, which spot in your cart they go), so you can't even let your mind wander to more interesting topics. And I'm not even good at it — we get incentive pay if we pick over a certain percentage (I'm not sure of what, exactly), and the percentage I'm supposed to be at is something like 70 or 80 right now (I'd have to check to make sure; it goes up the longer you've been doing it), and I'm consistently making the high 50s or maybe low 60s. And I'm going as fast as I can. I really don't understand how people get 100% and more; my cart would be a wreck if I tried to go that fast, and I'd spend all my time running mispicks, erasing any time I might've gained.

On the other hand, this week, they've started having me do other things, which is nice. I'm not sure if it's because they have too many pickers, or not enough people doing other things, or because I just royally fail at picking, or perhaps some combination of these things. Either way, I'm not complaining. Sunday night I did ticketing for a while, where you put price stickers on boxes for the stores you're shipping them to, and it was way easy; I'd do that anytime. And then a little bit Monday night and almost all of Tuesday night I did DTS (direct to ship), throwing boxes on conveyor belts. It's kind of tiring, especially if you do it for a long time (even the little, light boxes get irksome once you've picked up a couple thousand of 'em), and Wednesday morning especially, I was one giant ache. But it's the kind of ache that will eventually go away, once those muscles get used to being used. And the cool part is, my numbers Tuesday night doing DTS were 126%. Yeah. That happened. So I really hope they let me do that more often, 'cause I could make some serious cash doing that.

Okay, going to bed now. Night, all — er, morning, that is...

pizza

There was a time when I thought my strange tastes in pizza toppings ought to keep would-be midnight-snackers and other sneak-thiefs of food out of my pizza. The other evening, for example, I brought home a medium consisting of one half veggie lover's, and one half BBQ sauce, pineapple, and onion. Now, I know nobody else in the world wants any of that second half, and my mother specifically doesn't like onions, which I should think would keep her out of either half, but I made the mistake of getting a stuffed crust—when I came back today, the pieces were all intact except for two, and from those two, the crust had been carefully cut away and apparently consumed.

I suppose I should be expecting this, seeing as how she's starting a new diet and all. The fun part is, though, that the diet hasn't even officially started yet. I'm going to have to bring in the mini-fridge and put it in my room or something, if I want to keep food in the house. (Mom, if you're reading this, STAY OUT OF MY ROOM.)

bizarre

So, I was working this evening, and around 7:30 pm, returning from a delivery, I made a right turn into the Pizza Hut parking lot and...my turn signal didn't stop. I mean, the little handle clicked back into the "off" position and everything, but the light on my dash was still blinking, and the little ticking noise was still ticking, and, sure enough, both the front and rear signal lights were still blinking. Pulling into my parking space, I clicked the handle down, as to signal a left turn, and found that instead of helping the problem, I'd only succeeded in turning both signals on at the same time. Which would be cool, if I wanted emergency flashers (mine work, but are unusable because the button sticks) but totally useless as turn signals. And so the problem was thus: the left turn signal worked normally, but the right one was always on, no matter what I did. I could put the handle in any position, I could turn off the car and remove the key, but no matter what, the signal was still on, ticking, flashing, and everything.

I told the manager when I went back inside, and he said (after he quit laughing) that there was nothing to be done for it just then, but if things slowed down and I got a minute, I should take out the fuse, and that would at least turn it off until I could get it looked at.

Well, things never slowed down, and so I finally drove home at 10:30, turn signal still blinking merrily away. When I got home, I explained the situation to my mother, and we got a flashlight and went to work on the fusebox.

I took out each and every goddamned fuse, and nothing stopped that signal. I think there must be something more to it though, because the dome light didn't go off either, and one of the fuses had to be for that, too. So we were doing something wrong, but we didn't know what. Finally, exasperated, we dug out a socket set and disconnected the battery. Obviously, that did the trick. Except we still don't know what the problem was, or what we were doing wrong with the fuses. So tomorrow morning, I get to call my uncle Rob, who's a mechanic, and explain to him the new and weird habit my car has apparently developed.

And also the weird thing with the brakes, but that's another (and probably far more mundane) story.

My mother has now officially declared that I "do bizarre things to cars." I resent this statement, because this is the first bizarre thing that has ever happened to a car under my care, and I most certainly did not do it.

Also, she'd better hope that's not the case, because I'm scheduled for a 9-hour shift tomorrow, and guess whose car I'll probably be driving? (Hint: not mine!)

a long-ish post about very little

Happy Fourth of July!

So, I haven't posted in awhile. I would apologize, except there has been absolutely nothing of interest about which to post. There still isn't, really, but sometimes I get this nagging fear that if I don't post anything for a long enough period of time, I'll simply cease to exist. Okay, not really.

_{(Sort of.)}

Anyway, here we are. The reasons for my lack of online activity lately are many and varied—well, that's a lie. There are three basic reasons: I've either been at Dad's and unable to find a wireless signal (sometimes true), or I've been sleeping (often true), or I've been working (virtually always true, seems like). 'Cause I've been working rather a lot. And by "a lot" I mean I've been scheduled an average of 38 hours per week, and actually working between 40 and 42. And of course, this isn't counting my second job of the summer, which I just started this week: custodian of Seminary church (the one Mom goes to) in Roanoke. They needed somebody, and I was there, and voila! Another four hours of my life sold weekly to The Man.

Of course, it's nice that I'm working a lot, because it means I'm getting paid for a significant portion of my time that would otherwise be spent not making money in some form or another, but it also means that I'm tired a lot more, and when I'm not working, I'm quite often sleeping. This means that time I would otherwise be spending in at least a semi-productive manner ends up slept away, and thus I have written nothing (I had so many ideas at the end of last term!), read nothing (my list of must-reads grows steadily longer), and just generally done very little that makes my life feel worthwhile.

That's not to say I haven't done anything, of course. They've just been mostly little things. For example, in mid-June, I made two rhubarb pies, which were delicious. I also did a lot of online shopping, intending to purchase a Game Cube, but I ended up deciding to wait and ask for one for Christmas instead, because a) I am cheap, and b) my brother has one here and I will be abroad fall term, so I wouldn't have much call for one of my own until January anyway.

More recently, I have re-discovered The Shoebox Project, which, in case you didn't know, is basically the end-all be-all of Harry Potter fanfiction.* Seriously. I mean, I don't really get much into fanfics—I had a brief, mild obsession with fanfiction.net when the first LotR movie came out, but that, like my flirtation with MSN chat and my ninth grade crush, eventually faded. However, a friend sent me the link to this one and insisted I read it, so despite my misgivings (which were many—there's a lot of baaaaad fanfiction out there), I skimmed through part one, and then I had to go back and read it again, and then part two, and on and on and...it's so amazing. But anyway, the other day, I happened to go check it out again, and there was a post up from May that I hadn't seen, so I had to read that, and then I went back and reread some old parts, and and then of course I had to go reread HP 7, and part of 6, and now everything in the world reminds me of HP, or Shoebox, or both. Yes, I'm a dork, we've been over this, I know.

I must say though, going back, I was a little disappointed with the actual books after reading the fanfic. I mean, don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed them immensely, and I still bawled like a baby at that one part in book seven (gets me every time!), but after taking Fiction Workshop last year and looking so closely at what makes good writing *good*, it struck me how very mediocre J.K.'s is at times. I mean, I like the stories—the plots and action are excellent, and the characters are for the most part good—but word choice, J.K., word choice! (Though it was nothing near as bad as Eragon—I picked that up on a number of friends' recommendations and couldn't even finish it, and that was my senior year of high school!)

Shoebox, however, seems to suffer much less from this sort of problem; granted, it's a piece of fanfiction posted on the internet, so there are the occasional errors and things that a good editor would otherwise catch, but it is so SO excellent in terms of character and sheer wit that I simply cannot compare it to the original books. It is co-authored by two girls, one of whom has just recently had an actual original book published (co-authored with somebody else), which I really really want to find and read now, because it sounds rather fabulous.

Anyway, I really have very little else to say just now, so I think I'll go to bed. Bed sounds nice. (Bed always sounds nice lately.) Cheerio, darlings.

_{*It's a slash fic (Remus/Sirius), just FYI for any snitty canon-worshiping link-clickers out there. Wouldn't want to offend anyone's delicate sensibilities by letting them get all caught up in such a wonderful story only to have it go someplace they don't want it to (but seriously, after reading the first half-dozen or so parts, who wouldn't want it to?).}

counting

21 job applications,
14 follow-up calls,
2 interviews,
and one shittastic job offer.

Say hello to Papa John's' newest delivery girl.

Hey, I'm not complaining. It's a job, yo. Though whether it'll pay enough to leave a profit after gas prices is still unknown.

~~*EDIT*~~
So, this lady from Pizza Hut called me Friday and asked if I was still looking for a job, and I said well no, not really, I got an offer at Papa John's, and then she was all like, no, please come work for us instead, we'll pay you better and give you more hours and we just lost two drivers and WE NEED YOU! Not those exact words, but, well, you get the picture.

And she wasn't lying; I'll be getting close to 40 hours a week there, as opposed to twenty-some at PJ's, and better hourly pay too. Plus, it seems like the Pizza Hut people actually know what they're doing, unlike at PJ's (seriously, the guy told me the wrong location for the orientation. Not reassuring).

So if you wanna harass me, you'll have to call Pizza Hut instead.



P.S. I'd like to point out that I applied to a lot of places, most of which were not pizza joints. They're just the only ones that called back. XD

applications

I have filled out seventeen job applications in the past 36 hours. That's not counting the one at the temp agency on Friday. And I'll be putting in at least one more tomorrow.

I really really hope I get a job soon.

*sigh*

You can't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs...

...unless you work in the caf.