seiberwing

I have gainful employment! Somewhat.

About a month ago I dropped off my resume at Staldog 13*, a pet daycare a little bit south of here. I'd previously come in to ask about volunteer work, but they'd suggested I give them my resume just in case. Last Wednesday Dogboss** called me and said that they were looking for a part-time worker, and that mine was the best resume they had. Not sure what that says about the other resumes, given that I have no pet car experience, but perhaps they were impressed that I hadn't come in directly looking for paid work. He offered me the chance to start on Friday, which I summarily did.

The pay's not great and with 18 hours a week it's hardly enough to live on, but it's money coming in and as jobs go it's not so bad. Hours are very flexible and I can have Wednesdays open so I can keep doing my volunteering at the food pantry. Everyone there seems pretty nice, I think my major complaint about the working environment is that I have bad cell phone/texting reception in the building for no clear reason.

As to the work itself, it's some combination of preschool teaching and bartending. You keep an eye on the customers, you break up fights, you feed and water them, you try to make sure they go to the bathroom in the right place and clean up when they don't. It's not particularly exciting (one of the other workers described it as hectic, which confused me because I'm awfully bored some of the time) but everyone is nice and the dogs are very fun when they're not tearing into each other. Apparently dogs also get The Mondays and are particularly crabby at the beginning of the week. Aside the troublemakers they're also fairly friendly, and I got to spend the last half hour of my shift chilling in the front room during break/doggy nap time while one of them fell asleep with his head in my lap.

Obviously it's not going to be my career choice, even if I could make a living wage at it. I need something fast-paced and exciting, and watching dogs be dogs doesn't hold a candle to the excitement of volunteering at the food pantry. But it's better than matters as they were.

*not actual name of business
**not actual name of boss

My god, I'm sore. I think I need to start doing stretches before working eight-hour-shifts on the weekends and senior citizen discount days. I'm having trouble moving my hands and everything aches, and this wasn't even as horrendously busy as it was on Monday.

At least this is the last day this week that I work, due to a quick round of complicated worker shuffling, and on Saturday I leave for Chicago, so this will provide much nice relaxing for the rest of the five or six weeks before I formally leave the world of Big Blue Grocery. It's not a bad job, but the monotony seems to suck a bit of soul out of you and use it to fuel the infernal engines of the meat slicing machines.

Wait. So when they said employees are some of their most valuable resources...oh my god! I must tell the media!

My abstract and Powerpoint presentation have been approved by my mentors and my father, and submitted to DOE and the program heads.

My poster has been approved, printed (with one typo, damnit), and my poster session is tomorrow.

I've filled over fifty pages in my research notebook and made a few dozen charts of the data.

The research I'm helping with will, should theories and practicalities work out, eventually benefit the part of society that has malfunctioning eyeballs.

I'm productive in something that's actually important.

...when the HELL did that happen?

My mentor is a good lady, bless her heart, but she doesn't know the first thing about computers.

I mean, she told me to do up certain lab-report charts in the OriginPro program (which I didn't even know existed until last Friday) and when I asked her how to go about it, she responded that she really didn't know how.

...

I'm not sure how she expects me to do something if she doesn't know how to do it herself.

But at any rate, I figured it out on my own and did the charts as instructed. She told me to try and get it down by the end of the day; I did them in about half an hour. It's very unnerving when the woman with the fancy letters after her name knows less about the software at her lab then the person who's only used it once.

My first day interning at ORNL and I am BORED. Got most of my internet-reading training done and obtained my badge and computer login, but other than that I don't actually have anything to do today. Can't do my site training on account of my mentor won't be back until tomorrow and his partner didn't even know I was coming until this morning on account of being in Cancun. And it's damn cold in here.

But at least I have my interwebs. Might even be an IM program around here if I poke hard enough, or I could use AIM Express for the next...*eyes clock* Two hours.

Bored on a Friday night, as usual.

A bunch of volunteers, myself included, had a big Christmas party for a couple of kindergarten classes. We had decorations and a Santa and everything. I sat and talked to a few, and they were very cool about it all.

Me: What do you want for Christmas?
Kid with a 'fro: Spider-man! *points to Spidey-shoes*
Me: Ooh, cool. I love Spider-man.
Kid: No, you don't. Girls don't like Spider-man.
Me: Well, I do. I like Spider-man and Batman and Daredevil--
Kid: Girls don't like comic books.
Me: *turns to girl next to us* So what are you wanting for Christmas?
Girl: Supergirl!

And I was later asked if I was a boy or a girl. O_o

Then we gave them all their presents and everyone ran around with their balls and cars and lite-bries and robots. It was really neat.

Comcast is being screwy. Our cable's out and so's our internet access (I'm at Panera right now using their WiFi). It is of the suck.

But then again, I have the amusing story of seeing a woman take her kid out of Monster House for it being too scary--and then going down one theater and taking the child into Pirates of the Carribbean. Yes, that child-friendly movie with eyes getting pecked out, Kraken attacks, faces sucked off, and Tia Dalma being *very* friendly with Will.

Koi? Fish should click here.

EDIT: Cable and internet connection are back. I also forgot to mention in my last post that my auntie's mom is doing just fine, barring a mild panic attack on Thursday night in which calls to my auntie were in vain (being that while they were correct in which house they were calling, they were calling auntie's mom's phone number--which is in her apartment in the basement. My auntie sleeps two floors up and never heard it.). But she was released Friday and nothing's gone wrong since that. Fingers crossed.

Well, Will Ferrell was at the movie theater--for all of twenty minutes. He came in, said a few things, and left. Real spiffy.

But then came the good part: cleanup. There were dozens of cupcakes left over and I had dinner of them, the fruit, and the chopped beef. Also took home some of the flowers. Was kinda cool.

Sunday, we ran out of ice.

Monday, we nearly ran out of Coca Cola.

This morning...we ran out of electricity.

No, seriously. The power was out for about half an hour and only came back on a few minutes before we started the first movie. Lucky us, I think.

Not so lucky was the fact that I was attacked by the popcorn machine. It spat a glob of oil at me, and it got down my shirt collar and into my shirt. I dropped the popcorn I had and was clawing at myself to get it out. There's a couple of red blotches on the left side of my neck and my shoulder from the burns.

So, yesterday I went to my ex-babysitter's wedding. Was rather surreal, but pretty cool (aside from me not checking the menu and accidentally eating a crab-stuffed mushroom. But I'm okay, don't worry).

Today was mostly work as normal, aside from the discovery that Blinky is not the only one powered by squee. I saw a guy with a Decepticon hat on, went "OMG HAT" and made sure he came to my register. I told him it was the coolest hat ever and we discussed the upcoming movie for about a minute. The rest of the workday had me acting like a chipmunk on speed.