Getting closer

Yesterday me and Victor spent three hours playing Battlefield. It was lots of fun! His friend was with us for a while but left to do other things. I'm level 3 now. Yay!

After that Victor washed some dishes while I cleaned up some. I found his fedora! It had gone missing. The brim's a little womply but it's not bad and I'm sure it'll straighten out in time.

Then I made chicken penne with broccoli and we watched more My Little Pony. I lost track but I'm sure we're nearly done with it. I'm really enjoying it.

I had bad sleep again last night. I had to take a vitamin B to fall asleep and then I woke up at some point during the night and had trouble falling back to sleep.

It was really windy last night but it seems to have died down.

So, two months and twenty-seven days left before we move. Victor wants our next goal to be to find a camper. We should also be getting solar stuff at some point. Those are, I guess, our most expensive items. Everything else we can space. I don't plan to get a whole lot else bought (or packed) until I get my sewing area packed up. I worked on my sewing area yesterday. I packed two buckets of fabric. I didn't know just how much loose fabric I had laying around. But the pile is significantly smaller. As soon as all the fabric's picked up I'll put my machines to the side and take apart the desk. That'll clear up some room for boxes and stuff. Like I'll move that stove over there. I think I'll leave some of my sewing stuff out. I think what I'll do is go through that sewing basket that used to be my Grandma's and clear everything out of it and then pack stuff in that I might need that I don't want packed away. Like basic colors of thread, scissors, needles, bees wax, seam ripper, fray check, and stuff like that. That way if I need to repair anything I have my essentials.

Speaking of repair, I did eventually repair my work pants a week ago or so. I'm not sure how long it'll hold. I probably will have to break down and buy new pants. But so far the repair job has lasted a week.

I've decided that stove we bought is just fine. It's not a forever thing anyway, it's a "we'll use this for a few years until we find a real stove" thing.

We need to sit down sometime and go over the floor plan and decide what colors and stuff everything will be. Like the walls, and what kind of linoleum and stuff.

I think in a bit here I'll go wash more buckets. I only washed two the other day. So I think I'll wash two more. It's easier than doing the whole stack all at once.

Also, it kinda feels good to throw away things from work. Like all those scan out reports I was saving, and all the order comparisons I saved from when Dustin was changing my orders. I don't need those anymore. I've also been throwing away ICM things like a guide I took home to read on how to do the IDR and the guide from when we had to do the certification. I think I'll offer Bonnie my old work shirts (and if she doesn't want them I'll offer them to Anita) and take home my certification plaque when I drop those off. I wonder how the last week or two will play out? I wonder if I'll keep doing what I've been doing up till the last day and then hand it over to Dustin or if they'll swap us out and have me as the night person for the last week and have me work with him an hour or two a day as training? I know they'll jump on the chance to schedule extra people so they can push Dustin's 40 hours into training time which has no bearing on our regular scheduling hours. So maybe they'll give us both the same shifts. At that point I don't think I'd care much whatever they had me doing. Or maybe Zhaun will push hard to get someone besides Dustin in as manager. Doubt he'd win that argument though, as Dustin does have a few years worth of experience and unless he quit too there's not a lot of other options for Zhaun. Either way I'm going to give Zhaun advance warning by a day or two to give him time to think about it. Like I'll tell him on a Wednesday and then put in my notice on a Friday. I'm going to tell Fred before anyone else though, if even by a day or two like with Zhaun, because I feel like Fred's my friend and deserves that kind of consideration. I feel bad not telling Anita before I put in my notice, but, honestly.... when the time comes all I have to do is tell Anita and within the next day or two she'll tell everyone else for me. It's not that I wouldn't trust her not to tell, it's that she doesn't need that kind of pressure or guilt. Fred's just a vendor so he won't have any issues with that, especially since he's somewhat antisocial.

So I guess I'll post this then go see about washing up some buckets. I need to bring home more buckets. But tonight I can't because I have mega event stuff to buy. I have coupons for things like margarine, toilet paper, mayonnaise, and cereal, all of which are on mega event. And mega event ends tomorrow night so this is my last chance. So I'll bring home buckets some other day, maybe Wednesday or Thursday. I'll bring them home in a smaller egg box so I can pack books in it. I prefer smaller egg boxes for books because they get really heavy really fast. And all the boxes I have left are bigger ones I think. So I'll carry the buckets out in a box, make it look like I was using the box for the purpose of hauling out buckets.

Posted a day late

I originally wrote this entry yesterday, but didn't end up posting it. So I'm posting it now:

Something I forgot that happened Wednesday that added to my stress happened while I was filling yogurt. Remember a while back I was complaining about this fat woman who's a regular customer who bought a ton of carb masters yogurt? She was back. I had my wheeler of yogurt out and we looked on it, no cases of the carb master strawberry banana. So she says, "Well, I'll just take them off the shelf." and she proceeded to take every last one of them. Which made me out of stock. She knew she was making me out of stock. She already had a case of the vanilla and a few cups of other flavors. I see this woman in the store often enough, how much yogurt can she possibly eat within the next few days before she comes shopping again? Can't she leave a few behind for other customers seeing as she isn't the only person on the planet who likes that yogurt?

So anyway, yesterday Victor woke up with me cause he just couldn't sleep. Which meant we got going around 8:30-9:00. We went to work where I did my orders and left Dustin a note telling him to do markdowns. My schedule is awesome for next week. I get Sunday off because Dustin wanted next Saturday off. Which means I get a three day weekend. Sure I have to work on Saturday but for some reason Zhaun gave me a morning shift and scheduled John for an evening shift. Weird. But great. I have mostly morning shifts next week.

I asked Dee to put me in a personal day for Saturday and she asked how many hours I had. I had, I dunno, 34, maybe? And she said that's probably too many but that she'd put it in anyway. The worst that can happen is that it will be kicked out and I'd still have 3 days to try and dispose of.

We went shopping while at work. Got mega even items, two of which I had coupons for. Got some cheese which I had a coupon for. Some meat for a pizza. Milk. Soda. And while I was getting the milk and soda I sent Victor back to get broccoli cause I'd forgotten, and when I got over there I could tell his lack of sleep was getting to him. He was standing there holding the broccoli just staring at it. He said he was trying to figure out how much I wanted. So while I was over there I got some apples. Now, I had a 19.00 off coupon work sent me (they send you coupons for so much money off your order every few months and I haven't quite determined how they figure how much to send you, but every time it's a different amount, maybe it's based on how much money you spend there over the course of two or three months?) so I used that. I had a 3.00 off coupon from the last time I'd bought mega event items. So all my coupons together meant I had to pay 1.25 for all that stuff. Niiice!

Then it was off to Wal-Mart. I needed deodorant so I found some that's flavored with Honeysuckle and Tea Tree Oil. Smells great to me. We also needed mouth wash and toilet bowl cleaner and I found some sewing markdowns I got, and of course I needed more reese's easter eggs.

While we were there we got a sandwich from Subway because Victor hadn't eaten yet and I was hungry again.

Victor was so sleepy and tired he wasn't even silly in the checkout. Normally he does his best to embarrass me when we're in the checkout cause he gets bored. It felt weird and I actually almost missed it.

Once home Victor played with his Intellivison, which has been moved into the livingroom. After a bit of that he went to take a nap. While he napped I played some Sims until I got motion sick and got up to go clean. I cleaned up the table by the door and some of the floor behind it. I had started on the couch area when I realized it was time to wake Victor up.

I then made us a tuna helper which had expired on the 19th, but we figured it was still good. It turned out... ok, I guess. It was very bland and more brown than it should be. We tried putting cheese on it but that didn't help much. I guess a week makes that much difference. Not sure how a tuna helper expired though, we eat that regularly enough. Maybe poor rotation. I know we favor the fettuccine alfredo over the creamy parmesan so that might have had something to do with it too.

With dinner lately we've been watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It's the new animation style, which we had both agreed was hideous when we saw the figures in the store. But, as with most "updated animation" tv shows, you get used to it. And sometimes it's even kinda cute. Apparently due to licensing and copyright issues they had to swap some personalities amongst the ponies. Which is a bit amusing, but you get used to it. I like this series so far. I wouldn't say it's better than the others but it's not bad, I am enjoying it. The friendship thing is sometimes a bit much, though, I tend to take Rimmer's view of friendship. But, it's still sweet.

After dinner I looked around for a new crochet stitch to try. And I found a herringbone stitch that looked fun so I did two rows of it. I had been doing half double stitches. So I showed Victor what I had so far and asked if he preferred the hdc or the herringbone. He was like, "...there's a difference???" Upon closer inspection he saw the difference and was indifferent about it. He said when he's wearing it he isn't going to care what stitch it is. *sigh* Men. We finally decided that since he likes chaos I would make it out of a variety of stitches. So it'll probably end up looking like a really long sampler. I do intend to try a pattern with it, though, so when it's half as long as he'd like I'll start going back the way I came. Like if it was half done now I'd do two more rows of herringbone then go back to the hdc. And so far I'm keeping it pretty straight, there's a tad bit of a womple to the sides but it's not so very noticeable as my last attempt. I took some pictures but remembered my gaming controller was hooked into the usb for when I play Burnout and I don't feel like unplugging it to put my camera cord back in. The ports on the front of my computer don't work or I'd use those, and all the ports on the back are taken up with my mouse, keyboard, and something else. Printer I think.

I wound up going to bed around 8:30 and probably didn't get to sleep until 9ish. At some point in the morning Bonecrusher came to wake me up. He's been doing that a lot because he's a good kitty. But he's been waking me up earlier than I'd prefer (4:30 one day, 5:30 another) so I went back to sleep. A while later he came back and tried to wake me up again and I figured it was time to get up but before I could manage it I fell back asleep. I woke up on my own around 7:50. 0_0 I slept about 11 hours last night!!! I guess I needed it because my head feels weird. I think I'm... well rested? My eyes feel a bit weird, maybe they're just dry, though. I don't have the usual daily mild headache. I might feel a little weird in the head from sleeping 11 hours, but who wouldn't? Wow.

I don't have any real plans for today other than to clean some more and maybe pack a little. The markdown sewing stuff I bought yesterday filled up the rest of the box of sewing stuff so I taped and labeled it. We're going to have pizza one day and chicken penne the other. Not sure which we'll do today. Probably the pizza so the meat we bought for it doesn't go bad since I stuck it in the fridge and not the freezer. The broccoli can wait till tomorrow. And I feel more like pizza today anyway.

Oh, and whatever was afflicting my arms stopped yesterday. They were still a bit sore but not in any pain.

Packing here and there

And now for a post about yesterday. Me and Victor played Intellivison for a while. I beat him at Centipede to no one's surprise, and he beat me at the pacman style game to no one's surprise. I'm just really bad at Pacman games. Like on Mrs. Pacman he has something like 43,000 as a highscore and I have, probably only 8,000. On regular Pacman he's got 4,000 and I have 2,000 so it's a little closer. Anyway, I crocheted while we did this. Then while playing Atlantis he kept telling me to try and that I was shooting randomly. Which I wasn't, I really was trying. He kept saying I didn't understand the game. How can I not understand it? Then when we tried co-op Tron Deadly Discs I kept complaining that the buttons I was hitting weren't doing anything. Then he realized it was my controller acting up and he spent the next while fixing it. I put my hair up while he did this and started some laundry. I finally used that sample of laundry soap I've had laying around. I don't even remember what it came with, but it was for some green laundry soap of some kind or another, it smells alright. I used it on towels and sheets and it seems to have worked well. I dunno, it's just towels and sheets.

I made us pizza eventually and it was really nummy. This was the second or third time Victor's compared the smell of my pizza to that of Chucky Cheese's. I tried something different with the meat, this time when I browned it I put garlic in the pan to cook in with the meat. Victor liked that.

I got more cleaning done and took out the garbage. I packed up the PS2 and it's games as well as my Sims2 expansions. And I packed up the doll my Grandma sent me, she'd crocheted a dress for her. My Grandma was always crocheting. It was actually partially because of her that I decided to try and take it up. I wouldn't say it's a big hobby or anything, more that it's something I get a bug to do every so often. There's still room in the box but I'm not sure what for. I put my PS1 games in there as well, I don't have many though. SimCity 2000, Star Wars Demolitions and something else I think. I'm not sure where my Sim Themepark went but I can't find it.

I also packed another box with my non-fiction books. It's not hard to tell where my interests lie. My non-fiction collection consists of such titles as "Secrets of the Ancient World", "Mysteries of Archeology", "Ancient Egypt", "Natural Wonders of the World", "Medieval Times" and other assorted archeology and geology books. Anyway, I also found room to pack most of my historical diaries collection. There was enough room left to pack away Victor's fox plushie and there's still a tiny bit of room but I'm not sure what I'll put there. It's not a lot of room, so I don't know.

I think next I'll pack away Victor's collection of Michael Jackson magazines. It was, sadly, rather convenient timing that Victor's birthday was within about two weeks of his death that they released a slew of magazines about him that I got as a birthday present for him. So we put them in magazine protectors and they're on the shelf. But I think it's ok to pack them away, maybe I'll put my Star Wars Insiders in the same box to keep like together. But I'll do that later.

For my next book I decided on Two Towers. I don't know why I hate myself so much. LOTR is so boring. Oh. That's what I meant to do this morning, I was going to watch FOTR as a recap. Eh. At least the beginning of TT hasn't been too bad. I would tell you how many pages in I am except it goes on as though it's part of a whole and I'm at 413 or something pages even though I've just started reading it. Which I guess I understand but it's still kinda odd. Aragorn was being angsty. XD Spent nearly a page with him angsting on and on. hehe, I still remember my first exposure to LOTR, I'd been hearing about all the girls ooing over Legolas so when I watched FOTR I didn't know who was who or anything, I'd seen The Hobbit cartoon but that's it. And I was only semi paying attention to what was going on. I saw Aragorn and went, "That must be Legolas because he's the only man in this entire movie who's fangirl worthy." The actual Legolas went by pretty much unnoticed. Who wants prancing elf boy when there's a real man available?

Anyway, Microsoft gave out a dollar in free points on the Xbox so Victor spent it on an indie zombie game and played it all evening. I came in here and wound up spending the next hour or so writing. It felt good. Dunno if I'm still going to like some of it today. Sometimes when I write I go on tangents because it feels good to take it one way and then I realize it's not really in character or continuity and have to edit it or erase it.

Bonecrusher is so cute. It's become routine in the last few weeks that when I have breakfast I pour him some milk in the cap and set it on the floor for him to drink out of, then I pour the rest back into the carton. Occasionally Atton will want some too but not usually.

Maybe it was how much sleep I got yesterday, but going to bed was hard. I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep and staying there. It wasn't until Victor came to bed later that I started sleeping well. Fairly well I guess. Today I got about a normal amount of sleep and got up around 7.

No Inventory

Yesterday my arms were aching. It had actually started on Wednesday, with my right arm. But yesterday my right arm was aching still so I tried to use my left arm more and then they both started hurting. So that made work a tad difficult.

Bonnie said everything looks good, that she never worries when she's on vacation because she knows she's got me. She said, again, that in her 20-some years of being ICM she's never had a better backup and if I ever need a reference for anything to put down her name.

Also, Inventory was canceled!!! Because our last one, the February 1st one came back so incredibly good that they decided we didn't need another one in May. From what I overheard they're going to try to keep Inventory going in the February/March time area and they were going to try to get 168 in on that too. Too late now, kinda wish they'd done that a few years ago. Having Inventory in February or March every year would be great, except for when Easter falls in March. We had an Inventory once a few days after Easter and it was hell, that was my first one, the one I keep talking about that took 13 1/2 hours to count.

I had to watch some video for dairy excellence. The guy who does them keeps getting worse and worse. He was spoofing movies in this one. There wasn't even any substance to this one. It just explained that you put the Date Change signs in the milk crates that are the first of the new date. *gasp* I could have never figured that out on my own. And then there was a recap of things we "learned" before. Basics like how to rotate, which if that was something I didn't know I wouldn't have this job. It also explained our fresh promise stupidity. You know, the "Hey, if this milk doesn't sell within the first two days it enters the store let's mark it down to half price and then if it doesn't sell after one more day we'll donate it to the foodbank cause we love losing sales and profit" thing. I figure I know how to run my dairy, I generally have good dates. If we get a visit I can fix anything I need to beforehand. Harold is the cause of this. I still don't know what his purpose is. I guess he's the grocery coordinator? He must be new cause he came twirling in spewing the utmost in manager fantasy-land rules. So, you gonna add an extra 40 hours to dairy to cover all this stupid stuff you want me to waste my time doing that has no bearing on anything? I mean, maybe I really am just one of the better dairy managers in the company (*voice in the back of my head goes* "Stop being modest, you won Best Dairy Manager in the Company a year ago, District Managers occasionally show surprise at my work saying it's the best they've seen, even Bret said I'm the best dairy manager he's had. And don't forget that email Bonnie got about me that said I keep the best control of my shrink that they've ever seen." *to which I respond* "No, I'm actually kinda bad at what I do, they're just being polite. I believe I'm constantly on the verge of being in trouble."). Maybe others need that kind of guidance, and those rules. But sometimes it just seems like it's a big challenge. See how many of these rules you can break while putting on the appearance that you're keeping up with them. And then they keep adding them periodically. See which manager drops the stack of rules first. Doesn't matter, I'm leaving. I'll throw my stack to Dustin and watch him fumble.

At one point I was filling yogurt, on my knees filling the bottom shelf, and this woman reaches down next to me, which makes me jump, but I ignore it cause I thought she was going away. Then one of her kids comes up and stands between her and me and this means he's leaning on my shoulder. (maybe 4-years-old?) If that had been my kid I would have apologized to me. This woman didn't even acknowledge my existence with a glance. Not even when I hastily stood up and practically ran away, thing of yogurt still in hand that I set down on my wheeler rather noisily. And older child (13 or 14?) saw this but completely ignored it and didn't tell her mom or anything. Just blundered over and helped them block off nearly the entire yoplait section for a while.

Then later these two woman decided to use my wheeler of yogurt as a fence to talk over and I had to stand to the side and wait and wait and wait for them to finish their conversation and they knew I was there cause one of them glanced at me once or twice. I didn't really want to be rude cause apparently one of them had someone close to them die or something and that was the base of their conversation, and I couldn't think of any non-rude way to make them move so I could get back to work.

We are a grocery store. We carry soda. There are only 17 aisles. In order to find the soda might I suggest process of elimination? Works every time.

I got most the freight from Wednesday worked. But not all. I ended up staying over by 40 minutes.

When I got home I kept complaining about my arms and my left one had started to really, really bother me. Victor the back of my shoulder and turns out some cord or other had gotten moved again and caught on something. So he had to rub it and shove my shoulder back into place. It didn't hurt as much this time. Maybe the more times you do it the less it hurts. Which is bad, in a way, cause it means eventually my shoulder will move in ways it shouldn't. Glad I'm getting out when I am.

So far the scarf is going nicely, it might be getting wider though so I have to tighten up my stitches a little.

Brought home boxes last night. I figure instead of bringing them out in onsies and twosies I'd bring home a whole bunch at once. I brought home five. One smaller one sandwiched between two larger ones with two more large ones capping the other two. No idea what I'll use all that for but now I've got them. I figure I'll pack up my keyboard and Victor's guitar and my music books. And Victor wants to pack his PS2 so we'll pack the games for it as well. I need to get the rest of my sewing stuff gone through and packed. Which means I need to wash the, what, ten buckets I have waiting to be washed.

I finished reading Red Harvest last night. It was ok I guess. One of the characters doesn't seem to have had any purpose or point whatsoever. At least this time the author ended it good. The last one had a poor ending, like he didn't quite know how to end it. This one had a good ending. Overall I'm "meh" about this. It was a fun read, a fairly fast one too, but it's not a must-have. Also, the author seems to have been too caught up in creating as much gore as possible because he had a lightsaber wound bleed at one point.
*SPOILER*
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Maybe the author has hangups about brothers dying. That seemed to be the only point Rojo had was to die. He was sorta forced into the story and made to seek his sister. Once he found her he promptly died in front of her without accomplishing anything. Kinda like in the last book that boy's brother was bit and died. You could take Rojo out of the story entirely, like, copy the book and leave his sections out, and the overall story would be exactly the same. You wouldn't even feel like you missed anything. Yes, at one point Hestizo picked up her brother's fallen lightsaber but you could say she had picked up Scaberous' lightsaber, or the Sith Sword.
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*END*

yelled at a bagger today

Today was really snowy, it was so bad you couldn't see far and it was really windy too. On my way home the wind was blowing gusts of snow across the road and they looked a bit like ghosts, which was kinda neat.

Work was alright I guess? My back started to hurt and I realized I'd forgotten that it used to do that. This last week and a half as ICM was good for me.

Bret yelled at me a bit over not having any Land of Lakes butter that's on sale for a dollar. I explained that it's not in the ad and he stood there and looked through the entire ad to make sure and then said yeah I was right and that I can't possibly have guessed it would be on sale. He did warn me that I'd better have more eggs coming in. Which I did. Terrie got me two pallets added to my order for today.

I had a woman ask me if Dannon yogurt has cultures. I was like, "Um... I think most yogurt has cultures..." You have to have cultures in order to have yogurt, it's part of the process of how it's made. She didn't believe me so I picked up a container and showed her where it says "Made with live cultures".

Zhaun did grocery and returns so all I had to do was deli/frozen. Which I'd hoped would show up fairly early because Victor was going to be out and I wanted him to bring me dinner. I had told him to call before he bought anything just in case I was offloading a truck and couldn't take lunch right then. But the truck showed up at 1:30ish. Victor came in around 3 having not called. I'd been hungry since about 1, daydreaming about what lovely food I'd get. Would it be McDonalds? Burger King? Taco Bell? Little Ceasers? I'd also been kinda hoping he'd bring me a soda too. When I saw him holding a white bag I figured it was Taco Bell since they give out white plastic bags. Then I saw a second bag and asked what was in that.he said it was Peace Tea. I should have known then that I should just bring my ramen up to eat. But I didn't. I concentrated too much on the fact that he'd bought Peace Tea. Despite the fact that he'd said he was never going to buy it again. Because we found fruit fly eggs in it. He said that it's just protein and it won't hurt you. I refused to drink the one he'd gotten for me. To me, in my mind, he basically took 2.58 and burnt it. He drank both of them though, so they didn't go to waste. But I ended up with water for my break. And no real food either. He'd brought me a deli sandwich from Super 1. Which, admittedly, was far superior to ours, in both price and taste. But it was cold. And it was just a sandwich. There's a reason I started bringing soup to work was because I needed something hot to eat so my body felt like it got a real meal. Instead he brings me a cold deli sandwich? And Nutty Bars? Out of the entire Little Debbie line Nutty Bars are pretty far down on the list. I'll eat them, they're nummy, but I'd choose Swiss Rolls first. Or Brownies. Or Cosmic Brownies, which he can't have due to the Red 40 Lake. Or the cupcakes. Or the squares of stuff. Nutty Bars are something HE likes. And they're on sale for a dollar at my store, theirs has them 1.59 so he wasted yet another bit of money. So he plops these Super 1 bags on the table face up and I'm all, "Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to have those bags here? Throw them out!" I told him about how Bret caught someone with Super 1 bags once and started screaming at them. He did too, he was in the Meat Department and he saw it, picked it up, and looked at the meat guys all like, "WHO'S IS THIS!!?!?!!!" Everyone in the room had the deer in headlights "omg he's going to kill me" look. I don't know who's it was, I ran away before anyone confessed. Anyway, Victor also failed to bring his receipt in with him. I had to remind him that I work at a grocery store. Isn't it common sense not to bring food into a grocery store without a receipt? Do you know the pains I go to to ensure my lunches are upc-free so I never get in trouble? That's why I don't bring candy bars or anything. That's why I open the ramen package at home and throw it out and bring the noodles and stuff in a separate container. And then he just comes in with this stuff. And he tried to convince me to keep the second Peace Tea and drink it later. Oh, yeah, that would go over real well with Bret if he came in my cooler and asked where the receipt was. Nevermind that I am not drinking bug-infested tea.

So my stomach was kinda weird and upset from not getting a real meal. Victor said he'd done it to save money. Cause you know spending 6.46 on two teas, a deli sandwich, and nutty bars is so much better than spending 5 dollars on McDonalds, Burger King, or Little Ceaser's.

I was upset from that and customers were being annoying. Then Bret came by pushing a broom and told me to face dairy. Cause Lord knows I had a half hour to spare. Hope he didn't want me to break down the load today. Telling me to face at one of the busiest times of day when the moment I get done I'd have to start all over again is insanity. I came back to the backroom to find him yelling at Zhaun, who wasn't even on the clock he'd just come in to shop. Something about having too much backstock.

Oh, and now I have to scan my backstock. Whatever from the load won't go to the shelf we have to scan. I hope they intend to give dairy two people every day again because that just slowed down our freight breaking down time considerably. It's going to take about three times longer now to break down freight. Unless I fake it like Zhaun has been.

Then finally I saw gay little bagger go to the back with gobacks. A bit later I went into my cooler to find a pack of burritos and something from the olive bar in my cart. Usually I let it go, I get upset, I grumble, but I let it go. Not tonight. This time I knew who'd done it and I knew it was wasting time but I was upset, this was the last of several events and I took the burritos and the olive bar thing and took them up front, found this bagger, and I asked him if he'd put them in my cart. He said yes. So, in a loud voice I said, "This is a frozen item. It can't go in my cooler or it will ROT and we'll have to throw it out! It goes in the freezer! And this is service deli's." I put the olive bar thing on checkstand 1 and took the burritos back to the freezer. It felt sooo good to do that. I'd had that pent up inside so long I almost can't believe I said those words.

After that I felt better, less like I was going to cry. I felt like I'd already cried and was finished, you know that sorta empty feeling that's still somewhat satisfying?

I'm so exhausted and tired. But I wanted to post all that.

Oh, and my green tea soap is really nice. It's slick and nice. Kinda wants to jump out of your hands though.

Stapler Repair

I forgot to say yesterday that I learned more about staplers than I ever wanted to know. Generally when Bonnie's on vacation I wind up gumming up a stapler at some point. Usually cause I didn't load the staples right or something. Anyway, this happened yesterday. With her old stapler it took a while of me jamming a pen tip in there and pushing on the top while pulling at the bottom of the staple. Her new stapler isn't working that way. I discovered that the metal plate can move a little so I thought this might give me the room I need to work something down in there to push out the three staples that were jammed up. So I got a screwdriver and pushed. Not the best of plans. A long spring unwound and some metal thingie flew up, the faceplate came loose and a tiny spring was laying there. I had broke Bonnie's stapler!!! Her brand new stapler! Fearing for my life I spent the next 20 minutes trying to fix it. I grabbed her old stapler and opened it and compared parts and figured out how to put it back together. It works now, but I damaged one of the springs and it will eventually snap. Hopefully not for a good long while so she doesn't think it's something I did. Also the faceplate will never be as secure as it once was, but it's on there and it works just fine. So I guess I can add stapler repair to the list of skills I acquired at work.

And I remembered something I didn't do. I forgot to set up the tracking sheets. You're supposed to reset them after the perishable departments take inventory. (which they take inventory once a month) Oops.

I played a little more Burnout Paradise yesterday, and I unlocked the special version of the car I really like, I don't remember. Opus or something, and the special is Lightening something. Anyway, I didn't get a chance to really test it out yet because I unlocked the police car and it's kinda sucky actually. I can't figure out how to turn the siren on and off. Best I can figure is it turns itself on after the first time you crash. And it takes corners really badly with the backend skidding around weirdly. I much prefer my little green stunt car. But I will take it's special out and test it to see if it's any good. It's minus one speed but plus one boost, compared to the other one. I need to figure out if that means my overall boost speed is faster or if I have longer boost. If it's longer boost I'll keep it! I hate running out of boost cause then I start drifting in the oncoming lane to try and get more and wind up crashing.

After I played that for a bit I switched to Sims 3. I was going to do Sim Societies but it's having issues. A long while back my computer was attacking files it thought had viruses in them and I wound up losing my html editor, paint shop pro, and I guess Sim Societies. I've already fixed the other two cause I've needed them, but for some reason it won't let me reinstall societies so Victor has to look into that. In the meanwhile I played Sims 3. I really like doing the styling job. I didn't know you could choose more than one outfit! I found some people were asking for Everyday Clothes (2) and didn't know what that meant. But then I saw the little plus icon and realized I can make more than one set of everyday clothes! I simply must style my own sim so I can get her more clothes. Actually playing with the sims instead of building houses reminds me one of the reasons I  had decided to teach myself how to crochet. It's boring to watch my sim sleep. So I unraveled the scarf I had been making for Victor. It was coming out really bad. I was doing four rows of red, four rows of green, etc, and I was running the off color up the side of the scarf. And the scarf itself was all womply, wide in places and skinny in others, and there was no real rectangle shape. It wasn't in any sort of pattern either to where I could say it's a style not a mistake. And I'd been thinking. That scarf and the arm warmers I made myself both came out horrible. The hat I made came out great (for a newbie project). The other two were using single strands and the hat used two. So I am making the scarf with both the red and green strands together. I haven't done a whole lot on it yet, but I'm excited to work on it some more later. I'm not following a patten. But it's a scarf. How hard is it to mess up a rectangle?

Different microwave

Today I was doing fine cold-wise and I was only cold. Until nonfoods decided to start taking pallets outside and they had the backdoor open a lot. Then I got super frozen.

I asked Zhaun about John's shift tomorrow and turns out he's doing night checker, not dairy. So I am working 11-7 tomorrow for a reason. That's fine I guess. Except that one of the vendors took yesterday off so I have to receive them tomorrow. Maybe I'll go in a little early tomorrow.

My ears have been doing the half-popped thing a lot in the last week and a half, I think it's probably the cold that's been doing it.

I did leave two things for Bonnie. First I left the Ingram returns. And I left a Loftus invoice that has unauthorized on it, I short paid it and now we need an invoice for the items that were unauthorized which are still unauthorized. Eh. She can sort it out.

Had the conference call again. They said we can't block the frozen vendors, that when the loads come in we can't block them off with pallets. Uhm.. as someone who offloads trucks I can say I know quite a bit about this issue. When you have 9 pallets of frozen and only enough room for 7 of them if I have to block the vendors then I'm blocking the vendors, sorry. It's either that or we have to throw away a pallet's worth of freight cause they didn't want the vendors blocked.
They were also trying to tell everyone how to go in and manually authorize product. I know how to do that. I've been doing it since last summer, so has Bonnie. They sent out instruction manuals on how to do it.

I went on break only to discover the microwave wasn't working. eek! So Nora let me use the big super-microwave she has back in service deli. That thing is huge. And nice. The regular microwave cooks my ramen in one minute and there's still some water left and crunchy bits. (which I don't mind) The service deli's microwave cooked my ramen in 45 seconds and made it all soft and fully cooked. Really hot too, though, so if I use that microwave again I'll do it for 40 seconds. Nora said I could use it all the time if I wanted to. I felt kinda weird using that huge microwave for something as small as my little container of ramen. And I don't really like entering the realm of service deli, so I think I'll stick to the regular one unless it's still broken tomorrow.

I'm wearing one of Victor's sweaters again. When I came home I was telling him how cold I was and I went, "Wanna feel my feet? Cause I can't!" I could but I thought it would be funny to say.

Something funny I said the other day was when I was brushing my teeth and I knocked something off the counter and I stuck out my foot to catch it and instead my foot hit the cabinet door (we leave open so the cats can come and go as they want, otherwise they sit there and claw it open themselves) and I said, "Well, that would have worked if that door hadn't been there." It was really funny at the time.

Zhaun stayed in his closet today

Despite what I've said in the past I really wouldn't want to be the ICM full time. Even with dairy stuff to do I ran out of stuff to do. Imagine if I didn't have dairy stuff to take care of. I didn't go home early though, I did other stuff. Helped that Zhaun was sick today, I did his shelf reviews. Didn't help that Zhaun was sick today, though, because I wanted to ask him about my schedule. Why am I working 11-7 on Wednesday if John's working 12-8? I was going to ask if I could do 6-2 or if he wanted me to train him or something. When I told Victor Zhaun was sick he was all, "Aww, did his wife beat him that bad?" hehe He's come to work before bearing bruises she gave him. He works 6 days a week and the only time he's missed any work has been when he had his ulcer over a year ago. So he must be really down.

I was so cold and I'm so tired. For some reason my knee was really hurting earlier. My legs just don't like being still for so long like that. In dairy I'm rushing all over, kneeling, bending, moving. Every time Bonnie goes on vacation I truly enjoy filling milk on my first day back in dairy. And then customers remind me why I hate my job so much.

And like Tim told me, at least trying to find things to do to get in 8 hours is better than the 9-10 hour days I work in dairy.

Last night I went back to playing Sims 3, actually playing, not just building houses. I played... Jennifer?? I think that's what I named her. She's all gothic and artsy. But she was sucking at home decorating so she changed her job and is now a stylist. I like it so far. But her boss died. I should have known something was up when I saw a pregnant sim. I forgot to turn off story progression and aging. grr... What if my sim had hit middle age? I'd have had to start all over! I had to once already because when I first made her I spent over an hour making a teenager by mistake and then had to start over making a young adult. Because you choose personality traits and I guess it only lets you pick three (four?) for teenagers and the last one is randomly chosen when you get to young adult and I didn't want that. Sure you can save up achievement awards and change your traits but that's too much work. As it is I'm saving up 10,000 to change her lifetime goal. Her goal was to become the best house designer something. Not sure what direction I want to take her in. She's been inventing a little, mainly painting, she's been fiddling with a guitar, I might make her start writing. She's anti-social, neurotic, and dramatic. :D And I have mods on her. She's got a blue scarf in her hair and fingerless elbow gloves that lace up. I made her when the Ambitions pack came out. I was ecstatic when that came out cause my other Sim, Elizabeth, is dating a firefighter which is great because now if they end up married he can keep his job.

Can't wait for Sims Medieval! I'm going to pre-order it so I get the bonus items. Three throne rooms and two clothes.

I've also been getting yearnings to play Sims Societies. The last city I made on that was awesome. It was all authoritarian and stuff. Glory to The Mayor. Like there's soup kitchens that make you watch videos about how great The Mayor is. And my people are all down-trodden and neutral. And whenever some of my sims get either unhappy or happy I have squads I can send out squads to drag those sims in and make them neutral again. The pretty gazebo is "picturesque for public hangings". The wedding chapel is for people who have been given permits to marry. There's amphitheaters that show videos on how and why The Mayor is great. There's schools that teach kids the Glory of The Mayor. Museums that only show works of The Mayor. Churches of The State. Security cameras on every street corner. Apartment buildings that offer slight brainwashing. All sorts of great stuff. My computer couldn't handle the industrial wasteland city I made. Too much smog, my video card didn't like it. I tried to make a country town once but got bored. Tried to make a romantic eco friendly place but I think I got bored with that too, though I might resume that sometime. I made a really neat intelligent city with libraries, schools, and parks everywhere. I might play that one again sometime too.

Victor's out in the livingroom playing Contra again so I'll probably head out there and read. I don't like being in a different room than him. At least not for long.

Boba's Clone Wars Adventures

We watched the other two episodes of Clone Wars in the Boba arc. I must say I am horribly distressed by Bossk. See, when I thought that was Cradossk I was a little weirded out that he wore the same clothes Bossk wore but thought "whatever, sure". Then I find out it is Bossk.
1. In The Bounty Hunter Wars, I believe it was, there's a part where Boba gets the visor of his helmet cracked while teaming with two or three other guys. Back at Slave I he goes to a storage container and gets a new helmet. Bossk is eager and can't wait to see what he looks like without the helmet, but the door of the container blocks his view. Either Bossk's curiosity in how human's change as they grow up is contradictory to his personality or something isn't canon here.
2. Bossk had no personality in the Clone Wars. He was just kinda... there... I haven't read the books in a very long time so I might be remembering wrong, but I seem to remember Bossk as being bloodthirsty, impatient, and reckless. Not some stoic pilot who's all "eh, whatever".

So, it is my theory that Bossk was either sick during this time, some Trandoshan disease or some such maybe, or he was in a period of taking drugs or something. Thus, he wasn't himself and he wouldn't remember Boba helmetless. Two birds with one stone, ya know?

I wonder if they're going to show how Aurra Sing escaped the crashing Slave I? Cause we all know she doesn't die at this point in time. Makes me wonder why they didn't investigate the crash site? I suppose they didn't mention that she escaped because that would take focus off Boba and might give people the idea that she would appear again in later episodes cause that would be a kind of cliffhanger ominous ending.

I love that last shot of Boba being marched away by Clonetroopers, empty holsters moving with every step, his back straight, head held high... It was a fairly decent ending to the arc, however, I did so hate that he basically became what I said to everyone he would become. The evil villain who, at the end of each episode, shakes his fist and shouts, "I would have done it too, if it weren't for those pesky Jedi!" Like the comic villain whom you know will never win. At least they let Boba walk away with some respect in tact and we can blame any error on Aurra Sing cause really it was all her fault.

I'm going to have a time working the young Boba books and Clone Wars into the timeline. I've determined that since the first few books of the young Boba books follow basically his every move after AOTC they happened first, especially since the tv show is a little while after AOTC anyway, seeing as Anakin shows up as a knight and everything it would have to be a while after AOTC. So, the last two books of the young Boba series does kinda branch off into the realm of "this is kinda embarrassing, but I'm not sure if I should count them as canon and work them in or if I should turn a blind eye and insist those books were never published... or that they were intended as AU or that at the end Boba would wake up and it would have been a dream...". Because we have Boba going after someone I don't remember who, and then in mid-mission he changes his mind, abandons the hunt (!!!), and heads towards Coruscant to get Mace. Slave I is damaged and he goes to repair it and Anakin shows up and starts helping him fix his ship while Boba paints his armor. That's about when I stopped reading. I'm still uncertain whether or not I'm going to try to work that in or not.

Anyway, you can see who is is materializing in these episodes. His moral code, and such. Which Tales of the Bounty Hunters really says his code well, but you can see it in every other thing he's in. He's a far better man than Jango was. Jango was kinda scummy. Course I doubt Jango read much. Boba spent a lot of his childhood reading. He was friends with the librarian. Boba also has a poetic side, and we've actually seen him staring into the stars and just thinking about stuff. He loves watching the swirls of hyperspace, getting lost in them.

I hate to say it, really, being that Clone Wars is my inspiration, but I'm going to re-read The Bounty Hunter Wars after I'm done with Red Harvest. Somehow the Clone Wars has rekindled my interest in Boba. Not that it ever went away, mind, it just dwindled a little. Now I itch to re-read books about him. And since it was The Bounty Hunter Wars that gave me my interest in the first place I shall head there. Then maybe the story about him in Tales From The New Republic. I also liked Enemy of the Empire so I should read that too. I'm actually not very fond of his story from Tales Of The Bounty Hunters. I do like Tales From Jabba's Palace, though, it has my favorite Boba quote (which was apparently originally said by someone here on Earth), "Reality doesn't care if you believe in it." I don't like that one comic in Tales about whatshername, the mother of Boba's daughter, which we forever fought over whether or not it was canon, which with Tales comics it's hard to tell, some of them are obviously not canon (Boba's cousin hunting down a Jar Jar sippie cup) and some could be canon (Quinlan Vos meeting a young Han and using a mind trick to make him forget the encounter). I believe the general feel was that it was not canon. At least not until Karen Traviss had her say. I hear now that she's been pushed away from writing SW books her other fandoms are starting to get irritated with her too. Now, I never read her post-NJO book but I believe I  heard somewhere that his daughter makes appearances, and I have seen pictures of her somewhere. I suppose if it's done correctly (with traviss? not a chance) it would be interesting.

Red Harvest is picking up. Finally all these separate characters who appeared for one chapter are meeting and their fates entwining. However, all these "main characters" who showed up on the Dramatis Personae are dying off as not main characters at all. I guess he had to have someone to fill the list with, though.

Me and Victor lazed on the couch all the rest of yesterday. We had our baked ziti and sat around watching Simpsons while he played the new Contra game. I was going to read but I can't concentrate when there's something playing. One episode was a clip show so I thought I could read during it. During that entire episode I managed to read half a page but I wasn't able to get into the story at all and had to re-read some sentences several times before they sunk in enough for me to progress. So I put the book away and condemned myself to lazing away the afternoon and evening. It was kinda nice being so cuddly with Victor, though, cause I used him as a pillow most the time and when I got tired of that he used me as a pillow. He even let me braid his hair! eee!

And now to end this post with yet another of my favorite Boba lines:
Neelah, "You know, you could be a hero. If that was what you wanted."
Boba, "Hardly. Heroes don't get paid enough."

headache

I got a really bad headache at work today along with some nausea. I dragged my heels as much as I could stand to and ended up leaving an hour early. Mainly because there simply wasn't anything left to do. The reason I didn't stay the hour and do stuff in dairy was because of my head. If I had more receiving stuff to do or if it was a normal dairy day I would have stayed as well because I have gotten this kind of headache before.

Receiving went well, I only had a handful of vendors. Even for a Saturday it was small, and Saturdays are generally small receiving days. I got almost all the paperwork plus reclamation done during receiving hours. I skipped my break cause I knew I'd be coming home early.

I might have a little bit of issues next week because of a floral invoice I can't pay because there's a ton of unauthorized product on it and despite submitting it twice they haven't fixed it. And perishable departments take inventory tomorrow. Oh, well. Floral won't be the only department on the bad list, I have two for service deli and one for produce that I can't pay because they were nexed invoices where the product won't be in until Monday.

I took the 7 boxes of paperwork into The Room. I wasn't quite sure where to put them so I did an adequate job of it. Not my best. But adequate.

I took my bun down on my way home and it's helped my head a little. Right now I mainly just feel like curling up somewhere warm and sleeping. But I also am going to make dinner. Baked ziti. I have beef tvp ready I just have to get up and get at it. Bonecrusher actually ate one of the tvp bits and it was cute. He was like, "Well, that wasn't quite beef but I guess it wasn't bad..." but he didn't seem to want any more.

Oh, and I don't think I ever did get sick. Probably because of the vitamin c I've been taking since.

I couldn't find my big gray sweater and I really wanted to wear a sweater so I stole one of Victor's. It's way too big (I'm a men's S, Victor wears an XL) but I don't care. It's warm and comfortable.

Cold again

You know, I almost like doing 709s. The feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment when I balance one without mishap. I think I misspoke the other day when I said I've never had one not balance. I constantly have them not balance, but I've only once had an issue figuring out what went wrong. Today I got all the 709s from this week balanced. Now the only chore left that Bonnie had for me is to take seven boxes of pre-inventory paperwork into The Room.

I had a problem with Pepsi today. See, we sell some things by the case (think snapple 12-pks) and also by the singles (in with all the single serve soda) and what Pepsi does is they break apart their 12pks to stock the singles. Which means since we brought the singles in under the case upc it hits the zero cost report. So we've started bringing them in as singles somehow. Pepsi's invoice shows cases and then we somehow convert that to singles on our end. And I spent forever figuring it out. I called the other store, which Teresa there doesn't do it this way she just lets it hit the zero cost report. I tried calling Bonnie at home but she apparently wasn't there. I finally figured out that I had to vendor scan it in myself on the computer not the handheld. So I don't know why Bonnie makes them scan it on the gun since you can't use the gun to transmit it you have to handkey it into the computer anyway. If what I did was right, I don't know. I know I used the singles upc and divided the cost of a case between 12 singles and used that and the cost came out right. I know Bonnie explained how to do it once but I don't remember. I think I did it right.

Today was pretty peaceful. Slow for a Friday. I got super cold and had to keep trying different tactics to try and keep my feet from going completely numb. I tried wiggling my toes and shifting my weight and taking more steps than necessary. I would have broke down and put my big coat on but no one else complains about the cold and they run around in just a sweater. It's a matter of pride that I didn't put on my big coat. Stupid, yes, maybe. But I'd have looked even stupider if I'd put on my big coat.

I felt kinda bad for Dustin today. Last night John was up front checking a lot so dairy was pretty bad. A pallet and a half from Wednesday still back there and almost all the yogurts were empty. Zhaun called him in at 8:00 and then at 10:00 he had to do the trucks. I would have spent some time helping him but by time I was done with everything it was time for me to leave and I didn't want to stay on overtime to help him. Let him feel how it is to not have time to do anything. At least he doesn't have to do the orders!

Dustin and George the truck driver were talking about some job or other Dustin could do to get lots of money really quick if he went away for a month or two or something I wasn't listening real hard. Dustin has talked off and on of quitting sometime or other. But he was saying that he didn't want to leave Katie for that long. I think the money could be worth it. I wouldn't want him to go anywhere because I don't want to have to search for a new guy when I'm leaving in a bit here. Apparently he has 30 years to pay off his house. eugh. What kind of palace did he get for Katie? I also heard him saying once that he only buys the most expensive cat food because Katie tells him to. You know, I'm really not sure how Katie and Dustin ended up together. She's all barbie perfect with perfect skin, a cute/sweet face, long lashes, beachy blonde hair, good nails, and she doesn't really work much (though she has done bakery and go-backs at the store I'm not sure what else she does). Dustin is short, his nose sticks out quite a ways, he used to have acne or something and I think he still does some I don't look close, he's super shy, has a low voice, and horridly ugly hands (though he might have some medical issue I've seen him putting gel stuff on the sores/scabs/wounds/whatever). Maybe she likes that he works so much, pays for her makeup and house and pets.

Anyway, Dustin was saying if he had a job that paid this amount (whatever amount I didn't hear) he could retire in 10 years and he and George were laughing about being able to retire before 30. I managed to maintain my air of not paying attention to them so no comments or questions were directed my way. How would I even answer the question of, "So do you plan to escape at some point?" Uh, yeah, I've been plotting and scheming since August towards that end.


I saw the first of the Boba episodes of Clone Wars last night. He actually kinda does have a good reason for wearing Clone youth clothes. *sigh* Yes, I was wrong. I am glad they showed the difference of personalities between Boba and Aurra Sing. To show they don't like each other. And having Bossk's dad there helps too because that shows the beginning of why Boba and the Bounty Hunter's Guild don't get along. Boba had a worthy goal and me and Victor were both saddened that it failed. The episode does show how good Boba is, even as a kid, with a few mistakes you'd expect a child to make. They had angst about Jango and about how Boba feels about the Clonetroopers. Oh, Boba, my sweet, dearest Boba.

I decided to start reading  Star Wars: Red Harvest. I'm about 50 pages in. So far it's... interesting? Nearly each chapter has been from a different viewpoint and I'm not sure who the main character is supposed to be. I get a vague sense of an over-arching story. But so far I'm not very impressed.

Not getting sick

It was so super cold today. When I went to go on my break my feet were so cold and nearly numb that they ached with every step I took. That's how cold the backroom was. I don't know how Bonnie manages to get through the winter. Then on my way home it was snowing/hailing. The snow/hail was freezing to the windshield and icing it over a little in places. ugh

Also, my throat's been feeling weird today. :(

I was 11 minutes late this morning and Zhaun made fun of me for getting too into the role of being Bonnie. lol

I found a note on the receiving desk from Dustin about this woman who wants southern pecan coffee creamer. I have dealt with her for ages and ages and she keeps coming back every so often and asks if I can get it in and I give her the same answer every time. I can't do it unless I have a upc. Well, I just about didn't call her back because I was annoyed with her but I did anyway because I know I always hate it when a customer's mad at me because someone else didn't give me a note. So I didn't want it to come back on Dustin. So I called her and gave her corporate's phone number (which was about the second or third time I've done so) and she kept thanking me over and over for calling her back. I felt guilty that I'd considered not calling her.

I got all the 709s from last week worked. I still need to print the consolidated from Saturday and then I can start on this week's 709s. I was going to try to leave around 12:30 but ended up leaving around 1:30 because I wanted to get the reclamation pallet ready.

Zhaun says that he's going to give me three days off next week and we'll make one of them a personal day. Sure, that's fine. Normally I'd want my 5-6 day straight vacation but this year I don't care cause I know I'll be free soon. And since this year it doesn't matter if I don't get it why not help Zhaun out with hours by giving him the ability to cut me by a day every so often. I only have three days so we have to keep track of how often we do this. I don't know what my days off are next week, but I'm betting it's Sunday, Thursday, and Saturday. Cause Bonnie wants Monday and Tuesday off next week too.

Bret, ever the example of perfection, put a ladder back in our ladder spot without securing it. *sigh*

Also, apparently Bret got pulled over this morning for going 38 in a school zone. Haha!

In for a long wait

I finished reading Blackveil. I get the feeling that most everyone who's read it (I peeked at a forums) would sympathize greatly with me were I to throw it into a wall and storm off to cry. Another four years of waiting to find out what happens next. I have no idea what to read next. What do you read next? This book was much darker. I kinda don't recommend reading it until book 5 is out. I feel itchy and antsy. But considering book 1 came out in 1998 and we're only on book 4 it's going to be a while before book 5 is out.

*SPOILERS*
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I almost get the feeling that most of book 4 will come out as a "dream" in book 5 and won't have actually happened due to the smashing of the mirror mask. I mean, when the telescope broke in book 3 the rest of the visions of the future didn't come to be. The poking under the eye, and the balcony scene. Remember, she'd seen herself being poked under her eye and her and Zachery talking on the balcony. Later, she was almost poked, and then they were on the balcony but didn't say what she'd seen them say. But before the telescope broke everything she saw came to pass.

I hate Estora. I hadn't thought a whole lot about things from Zachery's perspective, I just felt shocked and sorrowful. Then on the discussion board I saw someone calling it rape and I guess it actually was more or less. He doesn't seem to mind too much, about any of it! I had expected him to wake up (for anyone who trudges through this who hasn't read the book, he had been shot with an arrow and then kept drugged to keep him unconscious so he could heal and then in the midst of all this was given something to make him "responsive") and there'd be hell to pay from everyone. I expected him to come out with the truth of what had happened and everyone would know and the people involved would pay, probably with their lives. I didn't expect him to quietly send everyone away and pretend to be nice to Estora for the sake of the public. But she did prove herself to be unworthy of being queen. But it makes sense in a way, the whole thing, it was a way to get Estora pregnant without making it seem like Zachery's cheating on Karigan. He thought he was with Karigan the whole time due to the drugs he was given and his already feverish state from fighting the poison that was on the tip of the arrow, and Estora knew this and didn't care that she was taking advantage of him. I had always kinda hoped Estora and Amberhill would go off together.

Spane was all of a sudden. I think he might have been mentioned briefly in book 3 and possibly book 2. Now suddenly he has a history and a story of his own and it's as if it's always been this way.

Hate the cliffhanger. Of course she doesn't die. ...right?

Mornhaven's return was sudden and kinda pointless. The suddenness of the mask was sudden and pointless too. Just suddenly, bam, it's there. Why would the mask appear to her like that, why then, and why? Who is this "trickster", is it another god? Why did she get the mask? Why would Mornhaven know of it and why would he suddenly want her to give it to him moments after she so conveniently found it?

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*END SPOILERS*

What Would Jacen Do

As promised here's my Clone Wars thoughts:

On the Satine episodes, me and Victor agree that at the part where Obi-Wan admits he loved her it was only because she was giving him a look that said, "If you don't say what I want you to say I will kill you. I don't care if it's a lie, I want to hear it!"

I think it's amusing how they took Padme, a character who's already something of a blank sheet, and turned her into an even bigger nothing. She's like comedic relief or something. Always popping up, "Save the animals!" or "Ban guns!" I'm surprised she hasn't gone on a campaign to eliminate everything that's not organic.

I know I've heard of zillo beasts before but after scouring the internet the only mention I can find comes from Clone Wars. But I know I've heard of them, cause it pings something in the back of my mind. KOTOR, maybe? Anyway, it's clearly Force Sensitive and all the Jedi were just being stupid. Dunno what Yoda was expecting to accomplish by running around on it doing nothing. And for as big a group of Jedi as were present no one tried calming it with the Force, which I thought rather odd. That would have been Jacen Solo's first thought, if he were there somehow he'd just look at everyone like they were retarded and go, "Master Yoda, how did Luke ever raise to the levels he did with YOU as a teacher?" Then he would calm the zillo beast, and it would lower it's head so he could sit upon it's back and he would ride it to a ship that would take it to an unpopulated planet where it could roam free, and because of this connection he would retain an ally he could fall back upon at some later point in time if need be. Meanwhile half the Jedi Council order the clonetroopers to fire upon it as if the first few thousand times didn't already prove that didn't do anything. In fact, wasn't that why they brought it in to be studied was because it's scales were laser-proof? So why fire at it if they already know it won't work? I thought Anakin at least would try to calm it with the Force, being Jacen's grandpa and already haven shown he has at least a slight ability with animals.

I hated the ripoff episode with the bounty hunters and the farm. As if Star Wars is just a joke, another tv series that has AU episodes where they spoof something else. SW does not spoof. I just want to sadly shake my head and stand upon a mountain top and shout, "I told you so!" and it would ring hollow, for there would be no victory in my tone, just sadness. Stop the madness now before it's too late. Season 3 looks to be enough to counter the movies and make the movies not canon anymore.

Anyway, sometimes men just don't see anything and you can drop hints and clues galore and they'll be just as clueless as before. Hinted and hinted that I had a certain entry in my journal I wanted him to see and even asked if he was mad at me. Nothing. He hasn't even followed up on why I might think he might be mad at me. I maybe should just link him to it. I've been lazy at printing and only have about 80 entries printed. But, still. I'm getting there. I realized that it's backwards, that to read it starting at the first entry you have to read down to up and right to left. Someday I'll switch it around and put it all in one file so you read the proper way, but for now it's fine. I just want to have the hard backup of it printed out.

I should do this with my journals. I have one that's been going since February 2002. That's 3,196 entries. eek. That will take forever. At least with my journal I have a client that will archive them on my computer for me so I don't have to recode the whole page. But I dunno, I kinda like how Victor's came out. Maybe I will go ahead and recode the whole thing and switch it around so it reads proper instead of backwards. hmm... I could have downloaded a client for Victor's too but I couldn't guess his password. What I did worked out well enough though. I do kinda still want to get into his account to see if there's any private entries, cause I'm not signed up on that site so all I'm seeing are his public entries. There might even be friends only ones I can't see. Now I simply must let him know what I've done so I can get in and see if there's private ones! He probably won't let me, though. *pout*


We played Burnout Paradise for a little bit last night but Victor had lost all his cars and had to restart and wasn't having a lot of fun trying to play with me and my superior cars so we left online play and just played offline separately. The game is a ton of fun but I have a few complaints. One is that if you mess up a race, say you're in first place and out of nowhere a bus runs into you which spins you around and then another car runs into you which sends you off on a side-road and you get a Drive-Away instead of a Wrecked and you're facing the wrong way to get back on the right road and your car's all crushed up and can't drive as well. But the starting line is on the other side of the map and there's no restart button. The other complaint is that it takes forever to wreck. You get a 10-15 second wreck cinema each time. ugh

The weather lately had been nice, almost balmy out. With highs in the 40s it felt like spring had sprung. A lot of the snow was melting and even the packed down ice was chipping away. Yesterday morning when I went to work it was raining. The rain turned to snow throughout the day. Large fluffy flakes. Oh, well.

I messed up the pumper of my new hand lotion. I must see about replacing it with the one from my old one. My old one was coca butter my new one is oatmeal. Suave brand, from Wal-Mart. My old one isn't entirely used up yet, though, but yesterday I didn't feel like scraping the sides of the bottom or something. I heard of someone who cuts their bottles in half so the pumper can scrape the sides for them. I might do that. Not sure, that might just dry out the rest of the lotion. I'll figure something out.

Well, it's time to let the cats out, Foxy's being kinda whiny. And it's time to shower, it's hair washing day. I've decided that instead of washing on every fourth day I'm going to do it on every third day because it's just too greasy by the fourth day and I look so ugly. Every third day is working out pretty well, though.

Left to clean up a mess

I never did fix my work pants. But I did fix my work shoes. I hot glued some places that were coming apart.

So I've been ICM for two days now. I do hope Bonnie's going to come back from vacation. I went through Monday just fine and with a half hour to go I went looking for the consolidated reports from Saturday to put with the dsd order register and esis and instead I found that Bonnie had left last week's 709s and the various reports to put together and a note telling me to pull up the consolidated from the previous Saturday as well as the transfers. !!! Not good. Explanation: 709s contain: The 709 and it's Second Page, an Adjustment Report if there is one, the ESI, the DSD Order Register, the Consolidated, grocery department has the Supplemental, and then comes Transfers if there are any. You put those together, take numbers from each report and add them up to see if they match the big number on the first page and if they do, good, if not, you have to research and find out why. I've never had one not balance. And there's one set of these reports for each department in the store, so, 16 departments I think. So yesterday I stayed over to print out the consolidated from the week of 01/30/2011-02/05/2011. Then today I pulled up transfers from the same week. And I pulled up the transfers from last week as normal for Tuesday. And I put together all the 709s from last week now all I need to do is balance them. I spent quite a bit of time today getting reclamation together. Bonnie left me a note to get that sent out. She prefers to do that on Wednesdays. Being sympathetic to how hard it is to load returns on Wednesday and being that I had no time to get them ready to be sent out, they'll be going on Friday. I got the mounds and mounds of stuff sorted on the damage cart but had no time to put it on a pallet, basically.

Fun, who is usually done and out by 7:00, 7:30 at the latest wasn't out till 8ish or so. Because his invoices didn't NEX down (invoices that are sent from their office's computer to our computer without the need for a handheld or scanning it manually) so he had to Vendor Scan (scanning each product and inputting the quantity and cost), which took forever. And Fun is a big vendor anyway. After that I did Meadowgold and Coke called to say his truck was having problems and he'd be late which was great. Pepsi's dock time is about 7:30is with Coke at 8ish. Pepsi didn't get out till nearly 10 because he had three pallets of credits to pick up and someone had worked off of them which meant they didn't match the credit invoice and he had to recount it all and do all the match, and Pepsi's a vendor scan vendor so he had add it all up and change his paperwork and then call the office and get them to fix the computer end and it was a mess. Coke came by again and said it was too backed up and he'd be back later. As did the local beer guys. Darigold got upset when I told him to take his product off the back instead of waiting for the dock, but oh well. Would he rather wait to offload? Coke didn't get in till nearly 11 and the local beer guys weren't checked in till nearly noon. Receiving closes at 10:00 and Bonnie would have been so mad. I was stomach-grumbling hungry but not upset. I knew when noon rolled around I'd get an hour long break sitting down listening in on the stupid conference call. Grocery calls go fast, no one talks and Harold rushes. In ICM calls they ramble on and on and on and various ICMs get on there and ramble on and on about various issues they're having that could be easily solved by just emailing someone instead of taking up everyone's time with their nonsense. Anyway, while the beer guys scanned their stuff in I did the milk orders.

And now they want the IDR Tracking and IDR Build to be in the same file and I can't figure out how to do this. They said to copy the Build into a new tab on the Tracking but it doesn't work. When I did it it reduced the size of the Build by half at least and some of the cells are filled in with symbols (#s? or maybe *s? I don't remember). So I'll have to play with it on Thursday. It has to be emailed as an attachment on Thursday and they want it the new way by then. I guess if I can't get it I'll send a note attached with the files saying I couldn't figure it out and I'm just a backup.

I stayed an hour today. I was going to do my order but Pam at the desk called me to ask why I made a money order for 2.80 for Fun when the invoice says 280.00? So I looked at the printout I had and it said 2.80 and that's what I'd gone off of, I don't look at their invoices. I'd thought it was some weird pricing deal we got. So I asked Chris who I guess is a rep or something now I dunno, and he said it was supposed to be 280.00 so I had to go explain to Pam who said we needed the money order back so we had to get the guys to come back in with the money orders and we got that voided and I made a new one, voided the invoice and made a new one. And as I was running around doing this a delivery guy showed up with "fencing". What??? So I got the money order taken care of and then dealt with the fencing guy, turns out it was about six cart returns for the parking lot. I called Bret back and he was confused and was all, "We don't really need these, but I guess someone must have ordered them." Bret told the guy to take them outside. In the snow. Yeah, they won't be new and nice for long. So finally I got the ad items ordered in dairy and told Dustin to order whatever he felt needed it. He's the one who has to break it down on Friday, so he can order however he sees fit as long as we don't run out. And he's actually pretty good at it too. He isn't as mathematically challenged as I am.

I don't know if the 709s from this week will be worked this week. I'll probably leave them for Bonnie. Which is ok cause at least they'll be put together with all the reports printed. It's not really surprising she's so far behind, she always is for about a month after an Inventory.

Anyway, Valentine's Day. We did it on Sunday. I got up in the morning to find Victor had left stuff for me on my desk. A large Reese's heart with a fork and knife crossed over it, a stuffed frog with a heart in it's mouth, two kerosene lamps (he was only going to get one but they came together as a deal), and a love letter. He can make anything romantic and had turned the lamp into a metaphor. :) He's so cute and sweet.

He made me tiramisu later. It's delicious!!!

I'm about 140 pages away from the end of my book and I'm starting to get anxious and a little depressed about it. It's all very shocking.

I have stuff to say about Clone Wars but my hands are tired and Victor wants to play Burnout with me.

It's late but it's here!

Before I forget again, I'd like to say thanks to all who wished me happy birthday. Yes, that is just how long it's taken me to remember.

I am now 346 pages into the book. This last chapter had me almost crying. Oh, and remember I said I'd had hopes for the ball? I was wrong. But it only added to everything that piled on top of each other throughout the next several chapters. And someone with far more artistic talent than I could hope for should draw a picture of Zachery standing on the steps of the castle in the pre-sunrise eerie lighting with his trench coat swooshing about his ankles. That would make a really neat picture.

Wore my hair in a nautilus bun with my black elasticy hair clip thing criss-crossing over it. And we had chicken and rice for dinner. I wore the same black undershirt I wore on Thursday but this time paired it with my gray Yoshi tshirt. It's nice to be able to wear my summer shirts in winter. Usually in winter my undershirts are large enough I have to wear regular tshirts over them (men's small or boy's xl), so I don't wear many girl shirts. I sometimes don't like wearing them anyway because of how they show off my fat. I was 118lbs on my wedding day. Why, oh why, couldn't I maintain that? I intend to get that small again after we move. I'll have the energy to, and be more motivated.

I brought home another box and four more buckets. I have three buckets packed with fabric and another that's almost half-way full. I will pack up my sewing stuff first because it will give us the room we need to store stuff. There's no real projects I have in mind for the next few months anyway. Fix my work pants, maybe, the thighs have been splitted out for over a month now. I did a little bit of a repair job on them a few weeks ago but that's ripped out by now. I do not want to have to buy new work pants with three months to go! My work coat needs to be patched up too. I already fixed a hole that was in the pocket, but the sleeve is ripping so I need to fix that. My coat I can understand breaking, I've had it for well over a year or two now. But I still don't want to have to replace that so close to us leaving. If I can make myself fix them it would be ok. Dunno about the pants, though, like I said, I already fixed them once. They're next to me, I put them there last night, in the hopes that I would remember to do it today. But I didn't. Maybe tomorrow. I'm off tomorrow.

Which brings me to my next thing. We're getting someone new trained in dairy and I don't know who. John. Whoever that is. Apparently one of the night crew newbies. I don't know some of the guys on night crew anymore. Some bald guy and some bulky guy. I guess it's good that we'll have someone trained in dairy? And speaking of that, I learned the other day that Justin's back up from Nevada. He'd left in late summer to move down there and now he's back and working at Super 1. As a bagger. He used to be my assistant manager before I had Dustin. So when I quit if he's still a bagger and I mention to Zhaun that Justin's back they might ask him if he wants back. Dunno if he's rehirable after the mess he left Wall Deli in (he switched from dairy to night crew to wall deli). But they hired back Darby, so they would have to rehire him. Dunno if he'd want to work for Bret anymore. Now he knows what I mean when I say Dennis was awesome. And they've got Roy or whatever as the assistant store director over there! He was a CSM at work for a while and he was really good.

Anyway, because I'm doing 5-1s next week I should have been in bed an hour ago in order to get my body ready for going to bed at 7 all next week, but I didn't. Oh, well. I'll just have to do it tomorrow. I'll have to tomorrow! I work at 5 on Monday. I have no idea when Bonnie's been opening receiving. I'll have to look at the check-in log to find out. She places so much trust in me and says I'm the best backup she has and yet I have so little faith in myself. I guess it's with any position. When I took dairy I knew how to order because Anita taught me when I was her assistant nutrition manager. But I was unprepared for the immensity of it all. At the time Nutrition was doing 16,000 a week and dairy something like 45,000. In Nutrition a hot sale item meant ordering two cases. In Dairy it means 10-40 depending on what it is and how many they're packed in.

I need to stop talking about work. I played Sims some more this morning. I love Sims.

Bonnie's addicted to Farmville. haha Better hope she never plays Sims! She was all excited and telling me about her farm, her cows and her pigs, her little garden, and how she loves pigs and she's got her pigs and blah blah. It was very amusing to hear her say she was playing it both before and after dinner. She's amazed at how long some people can play games. I have no idea what my record is but I bet it was during my first Twilight Princess run. I know I won that game in, like, three or four days with 50 hours of play time. At least I think it was that long, I remember it was on a weekend and I was sick with a cold. Good thing I have a journal I can look in so I can know for sure!!! *poke-poke*

History is the story we write with our lives.

I had originally wrote this on Wednesday morning but due to fear that Victor might delete this journal too I kept it saved as a draft until I was done salvaging his life:

All is not lost! Yesterday I'd remembered another journal he kept and I dared not mention it until I'd saved it. I'm in the process of saving it. I can't seem to figure out his password to actually go in and use a client to download it so I'm going about it the hard way. I viewed the page source and copied the code to my html editor and spent a half hour, thereabouts, looking through it and fixing it until I got the colors right. He used a dark background and light text, which when I go to print would use up my ink cartridges fast. No reason to waste all that. So I messed around and got all the backgrounds white and the texts black and even made neat little black lines to separate the entries. It still has the basic layout of the way he set his journal up, even shows his userpic, and if there were comments and everything, just in different colors. I'm saving them in 20 entry increments. And so far all two of the comments he has aren't worth saving. If there are any good comments I'll save a separate page for them.


And to be fair about 75% of that other journal was fiction. But that doesn't mean that some of it wasn't based in truth or that the other 25% deserved to go. Especially since the first part of it was mostly truth and the last bit was truth. So I'm still upset about that, but as long as I can save his other journal I'm happy. Cause that one goes from 2002-2006. Which makes me wonder about the one he deleted because I seem to remember it being at least a few years of writing. Yet he met me in 2007, we weren't together until later on in the year (August), but still, I don't remember it as being only a year and a half long.


Oh, and now that I have the coding figured out on the other one it's a simple matter of search and replace. I did page 2 in about five minutes. Anyway, if there's four years worth of entries to save I'd better get to it. Dunno when I'll print them but I certainly will, and then I'll hide it.


Yes, there's things in my journals that I don't like reading, especially from my teen years, but journals are important. As Indiana Jones' dad said, "I wrote it in my journal so I wouldn't have to remember it." I remember all sorts of things, going on adventures with my family. Hiking, trips to the beach, I remember doing something with floaties and a creek, going to the space museum, the air force museum, going to church and the games we played and stuff we did. I don't remember details. That's when I go to my journal to get these details. To get my day-to-day thoughts.


And Victor's life is so very interesting. I really wish he'd sit down sometime and write about it. Start to finish, doesn't have to be a detailed journal of what he ate and stuff, but just memories that stick out from childhood and when he gets older, a timeline of where he lived and what he was doing at the time, and maybe some specific memories. And I wouldn't print it out, I'd leave it there for him to add to whenever a new memory surfaces. All the things he's done, all the places he's been, shouldn't just be forgotten. A journal is your legacy, your children might read it, their children. It'll be a study of history and the life of an ancestor. I would love to have a journal some great-great-great-great grandma of mine wrote. I'd love to see her talking about life on the farm or whatever. And Victor's story is not one that should be lost. Maybe what he writes is only special to me, and will only be special to our children and their children, but because it's special it should be preserved. It's well and good to tell me things now about one's past, but when we're old we won't remember them as accurately. By time we're in rocking chairs telling stories to kids they'll be blown out of proportion and all truth will be mottled.


Well, back to salvaging Victor's life. Though some of it is fictionous like the other one, this one has a lot of truth to it, I think. Either way it's being saved.

And back to today. I think I made his journal look very nice in a print-worthy kind of way. And it made me think. I sometimes joke that I dusted him off and polished him up and I guess it's true. He has love and a home now. He'd look at his old journal and say he was being a whiney emo ***** but I say reading that makes me feel closer to him because it makes me want to hold him and stroke his hair and make everything better. I know I already have healed him a great deal, but I know there's still a little bit more healing to do.

Some parts were amusing. Like how he hasn't changed. Some things he said then are things I could see him saying now. Some things he talked about as liking then or doing then are things he'd do now or like now. I can see the man who is my husband shining through the depression and blight he downtroddeningly suffered through.

I do really want him to make a timeline of his life because different parts just don't fit together right in my mind. I'm more of a visual learner, so seeing it would make it fit better than reading and hearing it.

It sorta makes me want to post more poetically, but I have nothing to be happy and descriptive about at the moment. Give it about three more months.

Yesterday was a pretty good day, though. Victor put on the blue and white snowman button-up shirt I made as a present for our first Christmas together. And I wore this black long underwear type shirt that was smooth (normal long underwear has those squares but this one was just smooth) under a gray and black shirt. And we went out. We got drive-through Taco Bell and sat in the parking lot at the mall and ate and read. Then we went in and wandered. Victor wanted to wander through various stores for the sheer sake of being out with me and doing stuff. There's a new clothing store that's more a closet, really, so we didn't go in. He started to go in Buckle and I tried telling him their clothing is mainly over-priced grunge, but it took seeing a pair of jeans that cost over 100 dollars for him to believe me and leave. We went into Claires for a moment but the employee was all nosy and offered us a basket. ugh, go away. I saw a hair pretty I liked but didn't get it. We went skipped Herbergers as I feel I'm not rich enough to even walk through the door. I dragged Victor into Payless Shoes but the employees there were irritating as well, telling us the latest sales and asking how we were. Do you have any idea how many sales stores lose out on because of their *cough* "friendly customer service"? The best way to scare me off is to ask if I want help or to try to otherwise talk to me. They almost chased me out of the bath store by asking what our favorite fragrance was. I did end up getting some fragrance oils for soaping and the checker was asking me what my plans were for today! It's none of her business. We went into the game store which embarrassed me because of the manner in which Victor held out his arms and pretended to zombie in. We got Sim City Creator with some credit we have there. Then we went to Super 1 and their 12-hour sale had nothing I wanted on it, but we did end up getting some RC Cherry Cola that Victor wanted. And a coffee energy drink because he saw a migraine spot and wanted to beat it back. It worked but he was still kinda unresponsive the rest of the day. Then we sat on the couch the rest of the day and he played various video games and I read.

I am something like 240 pages in now. It is really good. I have high hopes for that ball. It is my belief that a certain scene that was shown as part of the future in the telescope scene will play out at this ball.

I have a little more to add to my thoughts up there on why Victor should write down his life: He doesn't even tell ME things he does. Like when he comes back from work he just doesn't think to tell me things. I prod and he tells me a tiny bit and I ask for clarification. Like in his blog the other day he spoke of something that happened at Borders and I had to ask him for details. The reason he paid for the other book when he knew he didn't have to pay, was not an accident, it was to make sure I got the book because he knew he could get a refund. It would have been nice had he told the whole story from the beginning. And just because something is a "day to day" occurrence to him doesn't mean it's not interesting to someone else. I'm sure someone who lives in the middle of Kansas or Oklahoma would love seeing pictures of where I live, but to me I can go weeks without really looking at the mountains. They're there and I ignore them for the most part. I do occasionally look up and go "wow" because they can be very pretty. But usually I don't even see them.

Oh, as for Victor's journal, if he reads this: I have made various backups under various code names spread about my computer. At some point in the future I will print a handful of copies to hide about the house in various places. Do not try to find and delete these. I spent hours working on this, I forwent your Valentine's present to work on this. I don't know if your present will be done in time now, but this was crucial to get done asap. Also, it is the ONLY reason I stopped being mad at you. Remember, some of those entries in your other journal were about me and now those memories of you and me are gone forever.

Laurelyn Touched

50/663 pages into Blackveil and 43 of them have been angst-ridden. I won't speak of it because of spoilers but, wow. With each new book it gets deeper and deeper. The other 7 were sorta depressive but not really affective in making me depressed. I need to get back and find out what's going on with Kariny!

But first, what's up with the hummingbird? I saw the symbol on the inside of the book and just noticed there's a hummingbird on the cover of the book too. hm. I am thankful there's a map of the forest. Now if only there'd be a map of the entire country. I am a bit confused about some points but I think I have a rough map drawn up in my head.

dream

I had a dream last night that was no doubt spawned by Battlefield because I can't imagine where else it could have come from:

I can't remember the beginning too well, but I think I was accompanying some important military person and one or two other people when we were shot at and the guy I was with died and he had this handgun that I knew I should get but it went skidding away. I got it and thus battle ensued and I hid in rushes and started making my way to the enemy base. The enemy were some variation of Asian, common enough in video games that I don't feel so bad about it. Anyway, at some point the marsh turned into rows of clothing racks (!?) and I was hiding under and behind them and sneaking around. I believed I died several times but I wouldn't let that be and never actually died for good. (I guess I respawned? each "death" was blurry for a few minutes) Eventually I worked my way to the base, which was like a castle/fortress place. I knew I would have a hard time of it, taking it down, while all the military people were running around and one guy in particular wanted to find me. I knew I should take down the rest of them, I'd already shot several of them, because I knew the moment I took the fortress they'd swarm me. But I did it anyway, it was a desperate attempt and perhaps might surprise them into me winning. I shot one of the main guys at the head of a tunnel that began under and behind the fortress. A bunch of women who were naked were in a sort of round tower top (though it wasn't really a tower) and I started to shoot them sniper style until I realized they really weren't any threat, and in a next tower over a bunch of naked men went at them and they started battling so I left them to it and entered the tunnel. Turns out it had some religious meaning to them and had artifacts that I destroyed. I considered holing up in the end of the tunnel to make a last stand because I wasn't sure how to get into the tunnel. When I peeked around the side I saw people marching around in the rows of clothing racks and I knew I'd be spotted if I tried to get around to the front of the fortress to get inside. The fighting between the people off to the side garnered attention and the soldiers and everyone knew something big was happening at the fortress. The guy in charge of everything fled and I thought him weak and compared him to our own president who would do the exact same thing and how much better our country would be if we had the Harrison Ford character from Air Force One as our president. But that was besides the point. I found a trapdoor at the end of the tunnel and started digging at it and moving the dirt to make a mound in front of me as protection from anyone who ventured into the tunnel after me. I woke up as I was cleaning the last of the dirt from it. It was above me and I was going to go through it into the fortress.

Haven't begun the new book yet, I'm working on something that's more important at the moment. Technically I should wake up Victor and get a shower in. The heater just clicked in. As soon as it's off again I'll go wake him up and get on with my day. I don't know how I'll get his Valentine's Day present done in time. I have so much work to do on it and it's taking so long. I spent an hour the other day on just one and a half aspects of it.

Something I've been meaning to say for quite a while now is this: I was thinking about that song, Holding Out for a Hero. That line, "...and he's gotta be fresh from the fight". Either she's hoping for an impossibility or she's never met a hero before. It is my experience that a hero fresh from the fight is anything other than fresh and is to be admired at arm's length.

Oh, the Hallmark commercial for Valentine's isn't so bad this time, at work. This year it's saying that the holiday should be about how much you love "us". Which is so much better than the one from a few years ago that advertised "buy two get one free" on their Valentine's cards. 0_0 That year someone either wasn't paying attention or had a sense of humor or was very bitter.

The gift card commercial is amusing. It's saying that you should get these gift cards as presents and then lists them. They're all for restaurants that we don't have here. Oh, yeah, that's a gift I'd want. It's also a gift to yourself because they aren't going to take that gift card and go eat by themselves.

got my book!

We found out last week that the Kreameries milk is not a WIC item because there's not enough nutrition in it.

Zhaun did the grocery truck today and it shows. I had two hours to spare tonight. Which is unusual anyway because normally there's lots of things I need to fill so I don't have time to work on the load. Today I got one whole pallet of freight broke down and worked. That hasn't happened on a Wednesday in a very long time.

Remember a while back I spoke of the guy with the canvas bags on his feet who bought an insane amount of egg beaters? He was in again today and apparently got some shoes. Good. We only had one of the quarts of Kroger egg beaters on the shelf and he asked me if we had any more. I said no. He got upset and was all, "*whine whine* I take the bus *whine* it's really inconvenient for me when you don't keep it in stock *whine whine*" I said, quietly, "Well, maybe other people like buying that too." How do you think the next person who comes by thinks when they see I'm out of that product  because you had to buy eight or ten of them which wipes me out? Maybe they wanted some too. What do you even DO with that much egg beaters anyway? Because he'd gotten upset I proceeded to go into the cooler and hide the two cases of the egg beaters I had so that if he complained to Bret and Bret came to see if I was lying he wouldn't find them. But nothing ever came of it and a few hours later when I was sure he was gone I filled the shelf. I don't care that he didn't get his precious eight or nine quarts of egg beaters. He still bought one quart and two dozen eggs. That is more than plenty for any one person to eat eggs for two weeks at the very minimum. Surely by then he'd need to run out for milk or something and can get one or two more. No need to wipe me out of something and cause the next person an inconvenience. I sacrificed one person's selfish greed happiness in order to make at least seven more people happy. I think that's a fair trade off.

I probably should have made a bale. We've needed it for a few hours now. And I purposefully didn't make one. Let night crew know how it's like to come in to work to find no one's made a bale. Let them make one for once, I wouldn't want them to forget how to do it. As often as they leave it for me they deserve this.

Victor picked up my book, Green Rider 4: Blackveil. Finally. Apparently mine wasn't late as their first shipment came in today. I want to call them idiots because it's a new release, you're supposed to order new releases to come in at least a day or two before the sell date. Now, thanks to their incompetence, everyone in this town is eight days behind everyone else and all the other fans have already finished reading by now. I read the jacket sleeve inside thing and there is no plot description! It's basically a telling of events, which is good that she put it there. I know it's necessary to have a few pages in the beginning describing events from previous books but it gets so tiring. At least now I know there will be very little of that. And I guess I already knew what the book would be about. We all did. I'm going to start reading it tomorrow. If I start tonight I'll never get to bed.

And as it is 8:25 I am going to go try to sleep.