dirty words

I did an Optical Drive Rain Dance for like 48 hours, and NOW I HAVE WINDOWS INSTALLED, YOU GUYS. I HAVE STAR TREK ONLINE DOWNLOADED. THE SERVER IS CURRENTLY DOWN, BUT I TRUST THAT I WILL SOON BE FLYING AROUND IN THE USS OMGWTFILOVESTARTREKONLINE.

Having Windows installed in a partition on my Mac PowerBook kind of makes me feel like I'm cheating on my operating system in its own bed, you know?

Now I must take a break from working on pr0n to go to church. It's a Unitarian Universalist church -- they seem to be OK with this sort of thing.

I remember college, and planning parties and events, and that's probably why, whenever I feel a prolonged sense of stress-lag, I wonder "Shouldn't the DJ be here by now? And where are all the raver kids?"

I'm covering two additional regions besides mine this week and part of next, which has involved getting to work at 6:30 and being late on everything throughout the day. Not having any money until my next paycheck involves taking the train, and not driving to work, which I would normally do to console myself for early morning overtime. I really actually enjoy the rush of extra work and deadlines and a little bit of crazy, though I would prefer it if there were a few more "Thanks for doing this so quickly! You rock!" emails, instead of the "Where is this other thing!?!??" and "How did you not guess I would want this entire spreadsheet in yellow!?"

A man in my office who is slated to make -- literally -- ten times what I make this year told me yesterday that I make "good money," which made me feel like I'm a bit of a loser for not being able to buy groceries until paycheck (Friday! Friday!). But! Today he told me that he personally asked a bunch of people (who aren't, unfortunately, in charge of that) to pay me more. How nice of him! It's a shame it won't work. He said, "Look, when they downsize this other position [which is currently paid more than me], maybe you can get them to give part of that job to you and pay you a little more!" and I thought I shouldn't spoil the surprise that the company will actually give me that whole job on top of mine and not pay me any more, and then give me Stern Memos About Overtime Usage. But! I have a job!

I love my life. Love. I really do. Even when my job is a little over the top, everything is colored in these happy shades of me being so in love with my boyfriend. I am frustrated by my inability to make his life perfect, but he likes my cooking, so that's almost the same thing, right? And my apartment flooded a bit last weekend, but that gave me the perfect excuse to steam-clean my carpets and then -- this part was unrelated to the flooding -- reorganize all my yarn and fabric into small stacking clear plastic bins. HEAVEN.

I'm not sure if this post was supposed to mean something or not. I think I was going to apologize for being so unavailable this week? I come home at night and just pray there's a new Supernanny or something on Hulu, so that I can go "Well, at least I'm not screwing up ten children and then airing their dirty laundry on national TV," because that makes me feel better about things like being within a quarter-ream of the whole office being entirely out of paper (!!!!) before the supply order came today. Really, I'm just an approval-needy administrator with substandard personal financial planning, a wildly unnatural love of unnecessarily complex excel spreadsheets, and a bruised heel from going for a run in worn out flip-flops, and a bit of tired punchiness. And what's so bad about that?

This one time (last night) at the Old Spaghetti Factory, I stuck part of an ice cube up my nose. Just to see what would happen. (The answer? I soon had water up my nose. And my nostril was cold.)

Then I had to work very hard to refrain from putting another ice cube in my ear while waiting for Sister to finish her ice cream.

Can't take me anywhere, I swear.

We pass the big old Catholic cemetary on the way to work. Today, we saw a brave little deer walking from gravestone to gravestone and EATING ALL THE FLOWERS.

I really wish there would have been a way to snap a picture and not crash into something. Alas, you'll just have to imagine the cute for yourselves.

Speaking of cute, would it really be that much crazier to have 28 rats instead of 27? I really really thought that four cages and 27 rats had gotten me over the Get More Rats (tm) syndrome, but omg, look at this li'l dewd! The downside is that I will have to quarrantine him IN MY BATHROOM because we have no other rat-free rooms in the house. Which is seriously crazy, right? But lookit his little paws and ears! And he's all by himself at the humane society!

ETA: Ratlet was adopted by someone else before I could get out of work! This is a good thing. Gooood thing. Yesssss. *is very pleased that the cute little ratlet has a good home, but is sad that my boys don't get a new friend*

I dreamed last night that nostalgia_lj's rats were really big, like small-dog-sized, and that she taught them to walk on hind legs and was showing them at rat shows. (The most disturbing part of this story is that rat shows really exist. Really. So I'm not the craziest Rat Lady in the universe, no matter what you're thinking.)

An appraiser calls me on the phone:

appraiser: "Hey, do you need appointments for appraisals?"
me: "Yes, we need to set up all appointments in advance."
appraiser: "Oh, well if you need advance notice, I'd like to set up an appointment for ten minutes from now."
me: "..."

Also, if you ever wondered why I'm so incredibly weird (and the "formative childhood years spent in a pseudo-cult" wasn't a good enough reason), this is what my dad was doing for a living when I was an impressionable preschooler. It's probably not clear from the video clips, so I'll explain: he used to write and tour these shows that were part classical piano concerts and part stand-up comedy -- sort of the poor man's Canadian Victor Borge. I think this was just after the phase of the existentialist performance-art videos, and just before the aforementioned pseudo-cult. I love my family. Nobody's family is as cool as mine. I'm the black sheep because I have a 9-5 job with benefits and wear nylons. :)

For the record -- I've been MIA from the intarweb for a lot of reasons (work = insane, sister = having a nervous breakdown, boyfriend = twice my age yet totally awesome, world of warcraft = downloaded). Please to comment if anything of magnitude has occurred in the past week or two!

I'm kind of full of love at the moment. Lovely spring sun just burst through Portland clouds, and it's making me all gleeeful about everything. Tammy asked me to knit her fingerless mitts! I have a cold but I am supah awesome and am AT WORK anyway which means I am as a real live healthy immuneful person! My job is so great because I get to say all kinds of official words and get to FAX THINGS! (Someday, the fax machine might lose its novelty. However, I still sort of consider it a mini-transporter, and I feel very grown-up and futuristic whenever I'm allowed to touch it. Which is every day, because it's a big part of my job, so I feel grown-up and futuristic a lot.)

I've been reading the latest Elle magazine and have all these Deep Thinking Thoughts about fashion style and eating disorders and sexual assault and how these things are all related (and not just in the sense of their being in the same sentence), but I have not yet told you about CALIFORNIA, and that is more important!

( Three Important Facts You May Not Know About California! )

The Oregon governor also-ran from this past election is totally writing up a contract ten feet from my desk! We all kinda squinted at him when he came in all, we've seen you before, and he was all, probably from all the campaigns on teevee [where people slung mud and such], and we were all, ooooh! Because it is rare people crawl out of the teevee and buy condos from us.

And Gabe Kapler is retiring, which isn't actually political at all. GAAAAAAAAAAABE!

Nothing else of interest happened today.

Last night, I was in a mosh pit at a Mormon Singles Mixer Dance in Lake O.