He's baaaaack! :)

Driving home tonight from school, I thought about how innocently my mind works. Yeah, right, you all say. :) But it's true! I usually never see the bad side of things and so in that sense, I'm really innocent.

My first really cool job was at Blue Shield in Hawaii, where I worked in their Medicaid customer service department. I really enjoyed the job, which involved being on the phone with doctors and occasional Medicaid recipients, or writing letters after researching questions from these doctors and recipients. One of the things I did included (although it honestly escapes my mind why) talking almost every day with the State's liason guy for the Medicaid program. I don't remember if I had to call him to ask him stuff or if I had to call him to report to him stuff we were doing, but either way we spent a lot of time talking on the phone.

This is where the innocent bit comes in. Gareth and I talked so much and so obviously enjoyed laughing and chatting with each other on the phone that both our bosses called us into their respective offices one day to tell us to "cool down" our relationship, thinking we were more than a guy and a gal who enjoyed working together. I don't recall if I blinked or if I laughed, but I know the idea hadn't occurred to me that anyone could think that we were had more than a business relationship. I laughed to remember this, because up till our bosses gave us "the lecture," Gareth and I hadn't even met face to face. And when we did meet a few months later, we were both so embarassed that our bosses had thought that "you know" that we couldn't even look at each other. Hehehe! But apparently, the bosses were concerned because they didn't want anyone thinking that our company had slept its way into the Medicaid contract with the State (which remember, this was back in the days when everyone smoked at their desks too, so it was a long time ago; I'm sure nowadays no one sleeps their way into a government contract. ::hum::). It made me look at things a little differently, but I obviously didn't learn much from the episode as to this day I still see only good things when I interact with folks.

It's been 20 years since then, Gareth's probably retired now and spends his days fishing or whatever. I'm still trying to ensure I'm gainfully employed someday. When I left Hawaii for good, he took me out to lunch (we had sushi!) and we were able to laugh about what had happened (or not happened, as the case may be) when our bosses scolded us for getting along too well.

And that's what I was thinking of as I drove home from school tonight. :)

The dishwasher is dead. Long live the dishwasher. Rob is happy because this model only comes in black. Meanwhile, till it's delivered in a couple of weeks, we'll be washing by hand. I actually like washing by hand, as you can feel the dishes becoming cleaner. It's a meditative process. I just don't like washing volumes of dishes by hand; then it's a chore.

My cherub has his driver's permit. I took him out for a spin today, not literally, in the Subaru as he's interested in driving a stick. Naturally, after five minutes he decided he'd practiced enough for one day. Heh. Not that I blame him, it's disconcerting to suddenly have to think about what your left foot is doing while also worrying about your right foot, right hand and everything going on in the world around you. He did a great job backing out of the parking stall and only bunny-hopped the car once in first gear. But he's riding the clutch and I must keep him from doing so. After all, the car's getting on in years and I don't want to have to replace the clutch since Rob and I are planning to get rid of it so we can move downtown. :)

Used my new tarot cards wondering if I should look for a new job or stay on with the current firm. Got some good spin on staying put. Or it could be a good spin on continuing to look. :) That's the beauty of tarot. Later on, I can look back and see exactly what it meant. The cool thing is that it definitely indicated that I'm having trouble making up my mind (no surprise there) and there were lots of indicators about changing jobs. The thing that I'm not clear about is if it refers to the fact that being a paralegal is a big job change, or that I will be looking and finding work at a different law firm than where I'm at now.

I dreamt I was Angelina Jolie. That's the second time in a year and since I don't think of her (that is, I'm not a fan), kind of unusual.

Holy cow. They have changed the interface with Blogger and now I have to get used to it all over again. Thank goodness I'd started my FrontPage migration last month or I'd be convinced any trouble I have is related to the new look.

I must get used to the look. :)

Do we ever outgrow skinning our knees? Yesterday as I walked down the hill to catch my bus, I slipped and gouged my left knee pretty badly. Lucky for me there are nursing students in my accounting class and they rushed to my rescue when I finally got to school, providing me with septicides, insecticides, infanticides and other cides, plus a large bandage. I dripped blood throughout class. This is a BIG owie :( If I were younger I'd be very happy because it is likely to leave a hideous scar right on the forefront of my knee.

Sushi's adventures with roaches reminds me of why I don't want to live in Hawaii again. Big bugs. Big flying bugs. Not sure why I have such a pronounced fear of them. Spiders, I don't mind so much, but roaches really bring out the girl in me who jumps on a chair and screams at the top of her lungs, "KILL IT!!!" When I was younger, I'd watch TV with a can of bug spray beside me because I always knew there'd be one sometime during the night while I sat up waiting for my mom to come home from work. And like Sushi, I'd try to keep eye contact with it so it wouldn't disappear mysteriously, making me jump at every rustle and click, wondering when it would reappear -- and would I have a good escape route. Blech. I hate bugs :(

I am a liberated woman.

This morning after studying the syllabus of Intermediate Algebra, I fell into a sort of panic due to the amount of homework this class will create. I figured, though, that I would do the homework before the start of Accounting, perhaps on my way to school from work Mondays and Wednesdays. Then reality set in: my accounting class starts at 6PM Mondays and Wednesdays and there wouldn't be enough time for me to get to class, much less dawdle with fractions and polynomials and graphs.

And then there is the massive quantity of accounting homework too. What was I thinking? I know on the way home tonight from accounting what I was thinking: I'd somehow lost my mind if I thought there was any way in hell I could do this. Yet my brain kept trying to figure out ways to get all the work done and maintain a good GPA.

Tomorrow I am going to officially drop algebra, to save what's left of my mathematical sanity. This puts me one quarter behind where I would be in order to graduate this December. But you know what? I refuse to be miserable and Rob sure as hell doesn't want to be miserable :) Therefore, I will drop the math this summer and pick it up again in the Fall. My paralegal certificate comes first, by golly.

Now that it's so hot in Austin, perhaps Miss Digression will be able to upload some wedding photos? Hmmm? :)

School starts Monday so this is my last weekend before the quarter. I am seriously going to try to drop my morning math class. It shouldn't be a big deal since financial aid counts 12 credits as full time and I should have about 12. Need to see what happens on Monday.

Rob and I have been discussing what to do with our commute. When I get a full-time job in downtown Seattle, we would like to move into downtown and have selected a likely target, the Harbor Steps. That means selling my condo, scaling down the contents of our life and even getting rid of the cars.

Funny thing is, I would never have considered such drastic steps, but during his hour-long commutes over the past two years, Rob has been plotting ways to cut the time and distance he travels to work, so has the finances figured out and everything. Those are long commutes :) There's other places to live downtown, and no doubt we'll start a more serious look-see after I have a firm job offer.

I bought a new deck of tarot cards the other day (as Rob put it, "spending my entire day's wages" which at $10/hr is very likely true). I spent some time looking at the art on each card and then trying to see if I could guess what that card meant before looking it up in the little fold out that comes in each box. Mostly I got them 'right' which made me very pleased. The thing is, I don't believe in tarot card readings necessarily, but I believe that we can find signs when we look for them. Looking for them and interpreting them is what most of us miss. So, when I'm looking at these cards, it's helping me become more aware of what could be signals that I might want to keep in mind. When I do readings in the little game, sometimes I use what knowledge I have about the person I'm reading for, but often I haven't a clue what's going on with them -- and either way, I've heard them tell other folks how remarkably accurate the reading was. Heh :) Maybe I'm more in touch with signs and signals than I give myself credit for.

A sign of the Pacific Northwest: you see a wide array of summer outfits, from down parkas to barely there anythings, all riding the same bus to work. :)

Something is blooming again and my right eye is watering profusely. It's worse when the sun is out, which I suppose one could say it's fortunate that summer here doesn't always mean a streak of cloudless days. My nose stuffs and only my right eye leaks. Rather odd and unbalanced.

Trying to get some QC done in the little game. I'm amazed by the imagination of my group, even in folks that were hired specifically because they had such good indicators of imagination. It's like walking through an area you did yourself years ago and thinking, "Wow! I did this!" to see someone you had a hand in hiring showing the very skills you wanted them to show.

Corey has comments, for anyone who hasn't been by. Although I can't imagine anyone who's not already there for her festivities not stopping by her journal to keep up with the wedding and all. :) Although a check of the commentary system shows it seems to be down so I've done my best to comment it out of my template for now. Could it be the influx between Corey and Gryph which has caused the crash of the entire SquawkBox.tv system? heh!

Must go stick a cork in my eye before catching the bus. Have a great Friday, everyone!

So Monday I arranged to get one of the other paralegals on her boss's bad side which enabled me to get her job.

Sort of.

She was already on the downhill slope of his bad side and asked me to help her get some filing done. This is her first office job. I can file in my sleep after years of practice. I could see why her boss was down on her for her lack of organizational skills (one of the things that I came across was an inappropriately filed memo he'd sent to her telling her to straighten up the ship -- she'd tucked it into a client's file). By the end of Monday, I was ready to strangle her. Thing is, she's so very nice and kind, she's just not very organized. Her boss said to me, "I'm not organized either. Someday she'll make a great paralegal but what I need right now is someone who can keep me straight." The way things look, that person could very well be me.

Which does make me feel somewhat guilty. Would he have been so vocal about his displeasure if I hadn't mentioned to him that I was already frustrated trying to make sense of these piles of paper? It's possible, and lord knows, the memo he sent her predated my frustration so he's been fighting the file battle for a while now. In any case, she doesn't know her career hangs by a thread.

He doesn't know she's been calling employment agencies from her cell phone in the ladies' restroom, trying to find another job.

An even trade, it seems.

This morning one of the partners commented to me that he'd never heard me speak on the telephone until yesterday when he called in to check on something. He said I have a very nice and professional voice. Could I just say, "Thank you!" and go about my day? No. I must respond, "Yes, I've been told I give good phone." Doh! At least he laughed. :)

In school news, I passed all my classes. Got 4.0 in both geology classes, which really surprised me as I didn't ace every single quiz or lab assignment. I think the teacher bumped my grade up because I snarled at the running start students at the back of the room one day and got them to shut up. Heh!

My sister wants to know why I am an Owlchick :)

Once upon a time, my GM name in the big game derived from mythology; I wanted to come and go in the form of an owl. My BossDude obligingly wrote a script that made it so. Another GM came along and she also wanted to be an owl (but was bright enough to do her own scripting) so we both came and went as feathered huntresses of the night; we referred to each other as "chick" which eventually devolved for me into "Owlchick." When I decided, after much hinting from Suz, to start an online journal, I mulled over the different names I could go by and picked this one. And they lived happily ever after.

I dreamt I was in the big game writing a script and I had trouble figuring out why things wouldn't line up for me (how typical). After consulting with the other folks, I found my mistake and started to fix it but then the script listed itself out and was all fixed up for me! While I admired it, Suz sent me a message (for I was dreaming in a text window), "I love fixing up scripts for fluff :)" Before I could thank her, Broos joined the adventure and said something snide, no surprise, and I said "Welcome to the party!" Then someone's car horn went off on the street outside and I woke up and started to cry. I was mad that someone outside would wake me up when I finally got to speak with Suz again. Just thinking about it makes me tear up again because I'd been waiting to see her in my dreams and thought this would be it! and I'd get to tell her everything I never had a chance to before! And, of course, when you want to go back into the same dream you were having before you woke up, you can't ever seem to get there again.

Must get ready to dash to work via the bus. When I lived in Hawaii, we referred to TheBus as "the city limo." Up here, it's "Mr. Metro." Either way, it's a long ride.

And so today I whisked the men in the house to Circuit City so that we could buy a thing to connect the Tivo to the home network. Rob and I'd gone to Best Buy and he bought some stuff, then when we got home and I asked how the LAN was supposed to hook into the Tivo's USB, Rob looked perplexed. We looked up the Tivo instructions again and Rob said, "See! It says you just need this LAN cable!" while I read the line that followed, "...connected to your USB converter." Rob paused, then put his mouth on the side of his face. He does that when he's been caught at something :)

In order to get the Tivo connected so that I don't have to run the phone line from the Tivo across the living room to the nearest phone jack any more, we decided to do the network thing with it. While at Circuit City today, Rob browsed the various connection things and the cherubs and I looked at video games. Rob pipes up, "Say! Does your laptop have a wireless slot?" "Yes," I said, "But we don't need wireless to hook up the Tivo, do we?" We discussed. Rob considered. Then he dived in for the kill, which means that this post is brought to you by the wireless network Chez Sheep.

Only my laptop is on it right now as somehow the Tivo sees the network but doesn't want to get involved. I'm sure it would love it if it did join the cause; this thing is speedier than the cable network and I don't have to unhook one of the PCs and run the LAN line to the living room any more. It's pretty cool!

At the law firm, I may get to help a new attorney (they hired another one while I was away at Con) prepare for a trial. This is civil court, not criminal, which will be fine with me. I'm not interested in trial work, I want to be a contract person. Still, trial experience is valuable for any paralegal. Although it was a bit disheartening when the new attorney said there'd be lots of late nights and even some weekends in my future. Oh joy.

I need to spend more time at eBay so that I can be part of a nationwide cultural phenomenon like John Ratcliff is. Only I'm not going to spell out why he's so famous now because that might accidentally link me to the madness. I prefer to be a hanger-on and watch from the sidelines. Well, and just be plain late to the party as usual. Although I suppose this makes me like, six degrees of JR now! Wheee!

You know, it was nice and sunny here in Seattle while I was at convention. Ever since I returned, it's been rainy and overcast. Go figure. No tanning for me. And next week, I'll be working at the law firm rather than hoping for sunshine, so that's kind of disappointing. It'll probably be nice and sunny every day just to annoy me. :)

I'm going to wander into the kitchen and cook some peas. Whenever Rob and I are hungry but we're too tired to cook anything and too lazy to call for pizza (which can be an ordeal to get delivered as we live in a gated community), we throw open the freezer door and announce, "Oooh! We have peas!" So that's tonight's dinner, by jingo. Followed by murder shows.

Sushi, I want to hear all about how your new PC works because my PC is going "Grrrrrrrr" every few minutes and it's starting to scare me. Is yours better than the one Rob has now? :)

I'm trying not to study. That is to say, I'm studying but I'm trying to make it more like reading than studying so I won't glaze over like a donut.

This technique is not working. There are many other things I would rather be doing than reading my notes. But tonight is my last final exam for this quarter and I must do well. If I don't, I risk dropping my GPA. I am not sure how well I did on the geology exam this morning; there were at least two questions where I was absolutely blank. I will be biting my nails over that class, I'm afraid. Tonight's class is my business law class and since this is an area that interests me, one would imagine I could do well at it. And I probably could, except that the text book is so dull and dry and lifeless that I turned it in this morning at the book exchange (it only got back $10) because I have not read the book in weeks. I've been going by the handouts Mr. Clark provides each night. Right now, I'm reading and highlighting, then as I finish one chapter's notes, I start at the first chapter and read all the notes again. I'm hoping it'll accumulate.

Of course, this might have been easier had I actually read any of the notes I packed for the convention, but of course I did not. Not even on the flights; I was too engrossed in Caesar to care about how metamorphic rocks are formed or what're the pitfalls of debentures. One of the reviews on Amazon.com says Colleen McCullough's problem in this book is that she fell in love with Caesar. As I'm reading, I am too :) What a guy! Maybe he does have his faults but boy, can she bring him to life and make you wish you'd known him.

My photos from convention are here. I chose to put them someplace separate from my usual photo location because I don't really want any of my players backing into my journal. Which I suppose they could if they so desired. I'm banking on laziness though and like to imagine that I'm surrounded by only friends and family.

This one of my favorite photos, which I didn't take but found on a player's photo website. It's of me, ChrisWho and Steph sitting around chatting Sunday morning. I don't get to spend enough time with people whose company I enjoy so every minute with them was so special to me! And like, omigod! Whenever I went into the hotel office room, I had to stare at Mrs. Beth, who looks SO good! Apparently she heard of my plan to provide breakfast for my players Saturday morning and told one of them to pass along her order which said player obligingly did, although she didn't know Beth's name. "Who wants a chocolate chip muffin?" I asked, and the player responded "She's tall, thin and has long red hair." :)

I still haven't unpacked. Yesterday I studied, read all the newspapers that came during my absence and caught up on some Tivo. I find that I am a lesser clone of Adrian Monk. I cannot see a stack of un-stacked papers without wanting to fix them. I don't like touching door handles. Things in disarray make me twitch. I absolutely love this series, which starts its second season next week. Yay!

Well. I'm home. Nothing bad happened.

I beat Steph at Dance Dance Revolution. Bwahahahaha! Twice! BWAHAHAHA! :)

Must study for finals. All the notes I took with me spent the convention locked into my suitcase. I thought I'd spend more time hiding in my room but instead spent most of my time talking with our players and staff. ChrisWho (She Who Has No Weblog) is amazingly talented. Everytime I happened to need something, why, there she would be just happening to pass by and overhear me and then she'd say, "Hmm. I'll look into that." Two seconds later, "that" would be fixed. She even drove home to bring her own DDR stuff to our party because I hadn't packed the right cables for my PlayStation, providing me with the weapon of Steph-Beating (see above)!

Convention was interesting. Some expected things happened, some unexpected things happened. :) For example, I never expected to get lap dances from members of both sexes who aren't necessarily interested in members of their opposite sex. Heh. Got to go dancing, sat around chatting, drank lots of coffee and met and re-met folks. It's funny to see people only once a year but feel connected somehow to them. A funny story to tell someday about one of them in particular. Someday :)

Convention this week. I leave Wednesday afternoon. Since I'd otherwise miss my Friday geology lab, I'm going to school Wednesday to get some of it done but must be home by 10:30AM as the airport shuttle arrives around 11AM to pick me up. Tomorrow I pack. This weekend I finished up my presentation (which I hope I get to use PowerPoint for) although I will likely fiddle with it some more. I like fiddling.

This will be an interesting time. Rob won't be coming with me and I'll be sharing a room with some of my GMs. One of them asked whether she could let a friend of hers stay with us, a player, and my first reaction was to recoil. The unfortunate impact of the back-stabbing incident this Spring has made me afraid of players. Which, of course, is nonsense; those weren't players on the attack (although there were some who were involved, they didn't start the knives in motion). I'm afraid now where I didn't used to be and that pisses me off.

I've always been excited about doing seminars and trying to impart some of my passion and love for the little game to the players who attend. Like most public speakers, I get an adrenaline rush that isn't fear of speaking so much as fear that I won't achieve my objectives. Lately I find myself concerned that in the middle of one of my seminars, someone is going to launch into an attack and I'll be powerless to stop them. I know some of the people who were present at the on-line bashing sessions will be present and that increases my anxiety. I am not a debater, I am not good at fighting (although I do tend to come up with some zingers later on after the moment is past) and I am pretty bitter and resentful that I feel this way now. Am I going to jump every time someone asks a question? Will I be able to look some of these people in the eye, knowing what they said about me behind my back and wondering if they know that I know what they really think about me?

Rob says I worry too much about what other people think and it's true. I'm a worrier. I worry that perhaps something has started that I cannot control or stop or avoid because I don't know where it will come from next. And that makes me angry, that someone I trusted could have taken my trust and turned it into so deep a disappointment and grieving that all my joy and passion is subverted into something else. I can't let that be the way I feel; to be angry and fearful would mean that they've won after all. I wouldn't want to give them the satisfaction.