Beyond Belated

I think I'm pretty good at the "pity me" approach to this blog. In fact I'm mainly writing now so that there's a recent post that's not somewhat depressing. I simply never have time to write when I'm busy and happy.

So today is the last day of my on week. I have a list of activities to keep me busy on my off week, and most of them are errand type things. I love errands. I mean, I like doing things that are planned and really fun, but they take a lot out of you and usually include quite a bit of spending. Just loafing and watching movies while you clean your room is awesome on the other hand, and free, and I just found out that I can check out Nova/PBS/History Channel movies from work and take them home! This is for CEU credit, which I need 12 point of for work a year, but I'm not particularly in need of the CEU's; I just love those movies. So interesting. Anyway, I also plan to organize all of mine and my family's pictures into the many frames and picture albums I have accumulated over the years. Also on the list is finally finishing the putting together and sending of Kristen's care package, planting the remainder of my tomatoes, lots of reading the Count Of Monte Cristo (which a few friends and I are reading for what we decided is our own book club), and playing with my sister's 5 baby ducks! She saved them from an overflowing canal last week and they are the most adorable things I have ever seen! I don't think I can talk about them without ending the sentence in an exclamation point! But I will because that could get obnoxious. They are beyond tiny because they're younger than you'd get them at the store. There used to be 7 but the little one died and one escaped from the green house. My neices are so excited about them, but they're not allowed to hold them because they're too little. But I did! Okay, enough about the ducks. I will end with a picture of me holding all 7 in my hand. I just put my hand in the swimming pool they live in palm up, and they all clustered onto it for warmth (they'd been swimming in the little pool within the big pool they live in just prior to that moment, so their little feet were cold). So cute and fuzzy.

=(

I have an archaic draft in my post section from the 9th which I will eventually post, but am going to ignore for now because I want to.

I'm at work. I have a media assignment due by the end of tonight online. I also have a 30 minute quiz on 3 chapters I have yet to read due on Saturday, and an exam for 60 on Saturday at noon for those same 3 chapters plus the two preceding them. I could really use some sugar right now. Thankfully I've started the assignment, and it shouldn't be hard to bust out the rest of it tonight. I think I'll wait till after Frisbee though. It's the last night of League, so I have to show up. I'm a little sick right now with some sniffles, so I can't have Mtn. Dew--it aggravates my condition, and I'm pretty sure it's what caused it in the first place.

Despite these things I'm a little sad. That doesn't make sense, but basically none of those things is causing my mood. They may contribute slightly and definitely aren't helping, but they aren't the cause. The same goes for work. I just woke up with a sadness in my heart today. I would watch a really depressing movie with junk food, but I have studying and sleeping to do. I've started going to bed earlier so I can get to work on time. Just a few more days till I'm a little more free. I'm still doing overtime, and I can feel myself settling into brokeness as I contemplate the many things I will need to spend money on in the next little while. That might have a larger part to do with my mood.

Having said all of that...I guess I should say that I got accepted to my program for the Fall. I will be spending the next 2 years studying Medical Laboratory Science with at least 2 people I already know. I'm excited, though I will not be able to work full time. It should be interesting. I also got my raise at work, so we're happy about that, though if I switch departments in the Fall it will be short lived. We'll see. Other than that I am finishing off 2 pre-reqs for my program this summer, which is not so good this week. My night stats class is super boring and late, so my friend Worm and I sit in the back drinking loads of soda and snigger at random things, and at the fact that we have to take a class that doesn't challenge either of us. And that is life right now. And I think I'm going home right now.

Bleh

I decided something needed to be written in red.

As per usual I have nothing to write when I do have the time to write, and no time to write when I have things to say. Last week I know I did a lot of things, but remember practically nothing. I didn't work, and that was nice. I finally got over my month and a half cold/bronchitis, which makes me very happy. I bought a lot of new books, and cds. My car was broken, now it's not. I made cookies last night, and now I'm tired.

I'm supposed to be getting a letter in the mail this week back from the program I applied to for school. I didn't really feel any anticipation or anything about it till now. There's no reason I shouldn't get in, but if I don't I'll cry and cry and cry... And suddenly I'm here thinking of all the reasons they wouldn't let me in. I'm also supposed to find out if I get a promotion at work this week. If I don't I'm outta here, that's what I decided. I deserve it more than everyone else, save one person, and if they don't appreciate me enough now, then everything else about them saying they'd "work around my school to keep me here" is bogus too. If I don't deserve it now, I won't deserve it any more then. And frankly I deserve to be getting paid more now, because I work hard and my job is hard, and even if they budget for more tech III positions in July, it's not worth it for me to stick around and work this hard till then without getting paid for it, not with the year that awaits me in school if I get into my program. It'll be hard regardless, but if I start making more now I'll feel more obligated to stay on in my department, which I do love. But if I don't get it, I'm switching either to part time in another department, or just to an easier department. That's that.
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So that's my patented "line of time." It's now tomorrow, and I'm pretty sure I'm quitting my job. I've looked into a few positions, one of them part time, but I think I'll wait to see if I get my letter this week, and then I'll know what my schedule for the fall will be before I make any rash decisions.

"...and God said 'I hate you Alfalfa'."

It happens to be a very ungodly hour of the morning and not only am I still awake, but I'm still at work. The last few days have gone about as wrong as they could go, so much so that it's actually quite humorous when I think about it. And actually I'm not at all upset about it. I haven't been upset for quite a while when things go wrong. Sometimes you just have to roll with the way your life is going. For instance, just yesterday (meaning Friday) we experienced an unexplainable instrumentation problem where the screen froze and so therefore I couldn't silence the loud beeping the instrument was emitting (I did however find out how to make it louder). So I made a sign that consisted of an unhappy facial expression with a thermometer in its mouth and a word bubble above it that basically told people to deal with it. I couldn't stop the beeping without aborting my run, so it ended up beeping for about an hour. After we finally got that one restarted, another error occured, which turned out to be my own stupidity, but we didn't run it again till the next day after I called the guys from bioengineering. I brought up our second instrument and everything went fine till it didn't. Some problem with the development pipette, which still isn't working and won't till after Monday since they couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. So we're down to one instrument, and we have about 3 days worth of samples.

So I had a lot of sample issues to deal with, plus I decided to run samples earlier than I normally would to ensure we get a head start on the problems that are suddenly present. And so after many hours of getting all the messes that were created this week out of the way, I'm finally restarting up our sole working instrument after a half hour rest to defrag the hard drive. I basically have an hour to kill before it gets to the point where I can actually start it up. Hence I'm here writing in my blog. I think I'll probably do some pipette calibrations while I wait. I figure I'll be here till at least 8 am, then I'll go home and take a nap till the noon fifteen pot luck, then I'll go back home and sleep some more. I have a ton of overtime as of late.

Other things that have gone wrong are that some hose or another in my car is leaking. If I don't refill the coolant area of my engine with water daily, my car refuses to go faster than 25 mph and shakes like a bandit. I have to drive down to my parents Monday, which means I'll be stuck there a while. Of course I have somewhere in SL to be on Tuesday, and I work the Wednesday overtime shift. I hope it's a quickly solved problem. Also, it was too windy to go skydiving today--which I guess was good considering it allowed me to get a jump start on work junk. We rescheduled for Monday. I can't remember what all else went wrong, because I'm kind of sluggish right now, but more certainly did. Storage is still down, so I can't get a hold of my samples, but I AM the sole member present in my department, so I get to listen to music loudly.

Tooley

My friend The Blaze is moving to Tooele. We make fun of him for this every opportunity we get. The only thing I remember about Tooele is going fishing there, and from a distance seeing the huge crater in the middle of the desert that they saw fit to call a lake. It was a man made reservoir, like so many in Utah, but couldn't they have at least tried to fake the facade a little? Put some trees out there? We now tell Blaze we're going to bring him a fake plug-in fountain and a chia pet as house warming gifts, so it will seem like nature's not so dead out there.

It turns out that in addition to that man-made monstrosity, Tooele also has sky diving. I learned that though Tooele is practically a hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere, not all of it is gross looking--at least not from the sky. Down close it's still not all that pretty, but from the air it's actually gorgeous. I'll still bring a chia pet the next time I go down that way, but my opinion is slightly altered.

The plan was to Sky Dive in Vegas for Fun Week. I'm actually glad we didn't. Though fun, the basis of Fun Week is sporadic--good 'ol not planned--fun. And I like the fact that the things we do are not bringing out the big guns at all. They're mostly cheap and fun mainly only for the ones participating. Anyway, I assumed sky diving would never happen as it was placed in the "things we should do eventually" bin. But my friend Sheidi decided years ago that for her 30th birthday she wanted to go. After my sky diving plans fell through, she asked if I wanted to go with her. I said "heck yeah". It happened to fall on Easter weekend. I worked. But I managed to drag myself out of bed at 230 am, for good old times' sake, and was able to finish up with work by noon. I then drove to Lindon to enjoy Easter festivities with my fam. I kind of thought it was just my immediate family, but it turns out it was the whole McSomethingkins clan. I took loads of pictures of my nieces and nephews mainly, turned down chicken and turkey burgers in better interest of stealing someones hot dog, ate lots of food in general, hid plastic Easter eggs (managing to drop one of them down a water pipe that will likely be launched across the lawn at a later date), and left amid warnings from my sister that "bungee jumping sucked, and falling is not fun."

She was wrong by the way. Sky Diving was something I wanted to try out of curiosity, not really excitement (though I wanted to go when younger), and it wasn't until I was there that any nervousness manifested itself at all. We watched a movie, in which I realized it was more a strategic process than I had thought, signed waivers, waited, then dressed up in funny little suits. I decided to shell out a little extra dough for a cd of pictures taken by some guy with a camera on his head following me around, and I'm glad I did the first time even though I never will again. My tandem master was married, had a slight beer belly (which it turned out made it easier to keep my back arched like a banana like I was supposed to), and looked a lot like my brother-in-law only with long hair and a braid. Sheidi's tandem master was the embodiment of gorgeous and perfect, and I was still bitter even though it was her birthday. He was from South Africa, but I swear the accent sounded more Bulgarian or something, and I hope if I go again I get to go with him because I'd like to be able to do more tricks going down. My guy was quiet, so I was left to freak out on the inside, and he only told me what to do on the plane, which was actually better. We only covered the practice landing once the chute was out.

The plane was small, blue, and there were 5 parachutes on board. We heard a great sky diving joke from my tandem master, and got to see Tooley in all it's majesty from the windows. Then the door opened, I was unsure how to react, and then my feet were hanging over the edge of the door, my belly button was out, my head back, and my arms in a chicken wing position holding the straps of my harness. I didn't do the actual leaning out of the plane, but was instantly aware of how crisp the cold air was from up that high. Breathing through my teeth took some effort. I knew I wouldn't be able to hold my breath the whole time, so I forced the cold air through my lungs. The falling was the most amazing and indescribable feeling. It really doesn't feel like gravity plays much of a role. I've always loved flying in planes and looking down at the little squares of land that look so different at a closer perspective, and here I got to do that only without the confinement of the airplane walls around me. I got to see how blue the sky was around me at the same time I was seeing the landscape below. Also, the sound of the air falling around me completely overpowered my vestibulocochlear nerves. The chute came out--also more fun than your average roller coaster, but hard to peg a description on--and suddenly I could talk and hear normally again. I looked around and saw a large herd of horses by a ravine that looked soooo tiny! I'm pretty sure I screamed with delight, but fortunately my tandem master couldn't actually make sense of them. He then asked me if I wanted to do some spins and turns. I acceded. He gave me hold of the parachute straps and told me to pull my left down as far as it would go, then to pull down my right arm hard and hold it. Afterwards he asked if I was still feeling okay and did I want to do some more. At this point I was having loads of fun and quickly agreed. After a few more tricks it was time to land. I put my legs as high up in the air as I could (which wasn't far because I have no flexibility whatsoever), and his legs hit the ground first and we ended up doing a sitting landing. I was soooooo ready upon landing to go back up.

Sheidi landed soon after, and it turns out that her tandem master went a little wild with the tricks, which was her fault for asking him to. I have an iron stomach, and therefore was instantly a little more jealous, but Sheidi apparently does not have an iron stomach and was white as a sheet. It turns out the only thing that kept her from hurling was thinking about how hot South Africa was, and how embarrassed she'd be to spew on him. She was then sick to the point of wanting to die for the next 3 hours. We went to see Blades of Glory, mainly because she drove and wouldn't have been able to right after that, and I have no night vision, so there you go. Sheidi's brother and sister-in-law surprised her by coming to see the whole thing, and it was he that paid for our movie tickets. And the popcorn that I largely devoured. It was funny, cheesy, and down right wrong at points, but I enjoyed the movie.

And that was sky diving. I absolutely fell in love with it, and am ready to go with anyone anytime soon. That means you Pinkie. And I only have to go tandem once more in the next 30 days to be able to go solo the next time. This could totally become a regular, and very expensive, hobby. Now I will proceed to the slideshow portion of the evening.

This was the exit. That was the plane. And everything around us was blue and gorgeous. The second is of me and my tandom master falling. The reserve chute is out so we wouldn't continue to fall faster and faster, but we were still falling. The smiley faces were placed there by me in the interest of privacy, in regards to one's alias. If you could see our faces, you would know how fast we were falling, because the skin on our cheeks were being pushed up.

A lovely view of the falling from above, and now you really can see Tooley in all its glory, but sadly not the horses from that far. Finally you have the landing. That white little tent dome is where you actually get suited up.

Good 'Ol So Jo

So I'm stuck in the South of Jordan today. Last night I decided to come up to return my library books and stuff, and to watch the Office at Frogkisser's house, and the thought came to me, "I wonder if Wal-Mart has any Easter candy left". Easter candy is my favorite candy of the year. I made the necessary waylay to Wally. Upon entering the parking lot, going straight mind you, I managed to hit the curb running parallel with my car--don't ask me how--and then my beloved tire was gone. Apparently it was one of the new ones my dad had gotten. Huge gash, and I managed to destroy the rim. I should have known that candy would be my down fall. I elevated my car with my jack, called my dad, then went into the store and bought candy. I looked at tires, but I had no idea what I was doing, and it turns out it wouldn't have done much good. I came out and my dad was unscrewing the rim bolts, and I need a new rim which we have to get at a wrecking yard on account of my car being so old. So that's what my poppy and I will be doing today when he gets off work at 430. Until then I'm stuck at my parent's house.

On hearing the news that I would be stuck here, I said, "ah dangit". Poppy replied, "you can 'ah dangit' all you want, but it's your own fault". I replied that I knew it was my own fault, but that wasn't going to stop me from 'ah dangit-ing.' He then told me I was free to 'ah dangit' all I like. I did so, then went over to Frogkisser's. I stole nerds and a peanut butter cup egg from their coffee table bowl, then watched 30 Rock and The Office. Then I went to Smiths to buy a toothbrush. I ended up with those little floss sticks--because I've decided to give the standing New Year's resolution another shot, the biggest bottle of Listerine I've ever seen attached to a little bottle of pre-brush whitening stuff (?), toothpaste with baking soda--because I love how it makes my mouth feel, a double pack of contact soln, face wash, a contact case, and about 25 bucks more of Easter candy. They had a huge shopping cart full of Cadburry mini eggs, the likes of which I'd never seen in such quantity. I have the biggest weakness for those things. I got home to discover that I had somehow not bought the toothbrush I picked out. I went back to get it. The thing cost me almost 5 bucks. I could have gone with another, but I had a really good feeling about this particular toothbrush. It has a tongue cleaner, and grips beautifully, and oh that arch! I've got to say, totally worth the money. I've become very attached. I might throw it a toothbrush christening party. Between that bliss and the fact that I got to sleep on my Queen bed in my old bedroom...I wasn't so sad about the tire thing.

Yesterday I totally loafed about my house all day. It was my first "Off Day" so because I have this wheeze and cough I slept in, then washed everything I own. I then proceeded to put my clothes on hangers and place them in the closet, which is the step that usually thwarts me. My room is much cleaner now, and would have reached Enlightenment by now if I wasn't stuck here. We talked about Buddhism and Enlightenment in my World Religions Institute class yesterday. I need to remember to go get a free Koran at the student center on Thursday. So now I'm just enjoying my time home alone with the Internet at my fingers, and my digital camera at my side. I've got to say, it looks gorgeous outside. I really wish I could be at my house right now utilizing my new pottery wheel. Fortunately I brought homework and a book of leisure. I could probably wash my car with a flat tire. I'll run close by errands with my spare--which is not fit for freeway speeds. And I'll figure out how to download pictures from sky diving for my next post.

Ahhh. My toothbrush surrounded by a heavenly glow. it's like the flash on my camera knew.

I Shouldn't Be Allowed To Think At 4 In The Morning

So I haven't had much time of late to write stuff while at work, and since I lack the Internet at home, that means I couldn't write at all. Or I forgot to. And I've also recently been waking up later (between 5-7 am) to get to work, and I've found that there is always more to do there the later one goes.

Now suddenly I'm at work and it's 430 am...I got here at 230. I've built my runs, I've volume checked one, and I'm waiting for the calibrators that never came in last night to come in. I can't really do much till they do. I have little things here and there to do, but I don't really feel like doing them right at this moment, and the sooner I do the more bored I'll become. I came in early today solely to leave early. Being the Saturday before Easter, my family is getting together, but I work. But I'd like to spend some time with them before I possibly die sky diving, which is where I have to be at 5 pm, and thus I need to leave work in time to get to my sister's by noon. I don't think I will--die that is--but if I do, Aaron can be "kind of" sad.

One might be wondering, what does she possibly have to say of import right now that would justify a post? Sadly the answer is das nichts. Although I think I may leave work momentarily soonish to get myself a caffeine and donut.