Category: Personal Page 6 of 7

Vacation

I love being on vacation. I want to do it all the time. But then I might get bored of it.

Good drive down to Florida this year. We did a couple of hours Friday night after I got off work, and then the rest on Saturday. I ended up driving most of Saturday, because Dad was reading. Yep, that’s right. My Dad, the man who rarely reads more than a magazine every now and again, is now almost halfway through Catch-22. I recommended it to him after I read it and loved it last year, and we finally decided that this trip was the time he should read it. To be honest, I was completely prepared for him to give up, but he’s really enjoying it. Mom pointed out to me that he really does enjoy reading when he’s got time and doesn’t feel like he should be doing something more productive, which is really right. I’m just really glad he’s liking it. And I finally convinced Mom that Reading Lolita in Tehran isn’t really about Lolita and that she might like it and not get corrupted by the presence of Lolita. And she is liking it! So far my book recommendations this trip have really panned out nicely.

Meanwhile, I read an entire Agatha Christie mystery today. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I’ve read a lot of Christie novels before, but not this one…and I saw it written up on a few “best of” sort of lists recently, so I thought I’d check it out. Really great detective novel. Agatha Christie is such good vacation reading…light, easy, fun, and makes you think only in an enjoyable “solve the mystery” sort of way. So now I only have seven books left to read on the trip. Yeah, I way overdo it. Always have.

I haven’t been down to Pensacola Beach since Hurricane Ivan devastated the place two years ago. My parents were down last year, so I’d heard about it, but even now it’s still pretty bad. The beach is completely flat in most places, no sand dunes. About half of the condos are still out of commission, and the road is in the process of being completely redone. Construction equipment everywhere, and piles of sand and debris that have been sifted out of one another. I’ve seen it after hurricanes before, but never like this. And this is two years later! Dad’s amazed that it’s taking so long to get stuff fixed…I’m speculating that some of the labor force has been siphoned off to New Orleans, but who knows. Maybe the condo owners are just still arguing with the insurance companies.

The condos we used to rent aren’t opened back up yet. The ones we’re in are pretty nice, but there’s no pool or tennis courts. But there’s a great balcony overlooking the Gulf, and I get to sleep in where the TV is, which is fine with me. ;) And I’ve just discovered that there’s a wireless internet connection (obviously!). Although I probably would’ve gotten more reading done had I not discovered that I can use the internet. Oh well.

Obsession

Hi, I’m Jandy, and I have an obsessive personality. Or something like it. I get incredibly obsessed incredibly easily, and when I get obsessed with something, I go all the way. When I was little, it was horses. I had an imaginary stable. But this wasn’t just “oh, sometimes I imagine I have horses.” No, I had a registry. Like, a physical notebook that listed all my horses’ names, their breed and breeding, their height, their color, their discipline, their temperament…and this was an ongoing thing for years, where the horses got older, and I bred them together, and got new horses that got added to the registry, etc. I still have that book somewhere.

Later, it was figure skating. This was after the 1994 Olympics. I watched it faithfully, learned the names of all the skaters, all the commentators, all the jumps and how to do them (although I can’t skate, so I just had to pretend to do them in my living room), kept a spreadsheet keeping track of which skaters were from where and what they’d won, taped and watched every competition for the next two or three years.

On to TV shows, which remain an obsession–to varying degrees depending on the TV show. I can name you pretty much every episode of Buffy right now. Veronica Mars, same thing. I go through phases where all I want to do is watch a specific TV show, whether it be 24 or Lost or Gilmore Girls or Desperate Housewives or whatever. These obsessions tend to be short-lived and don’t extend outside of the show itself (i.e., I don’t really get a great desire to learn everything about the actors’ lives).

Movies are an ongoing one, so I’m not even mentioning it. My love of movies is always bubbling under the surface, but it rarely exhibits itself as an out-and-out obsession.

My current obsession, as you may have guessed based on my last couple of posts, is American Idol, and believe me saying that is incredibly embarrassing. I have spent four years mocking this show specifically and reality TV in general (I still reserve my right to mock other reality shows), and claiming that even this year when I decided to try it out as a concert show, I wouldn’t get into the whole competition/voting aspect. Yeah, that lasted all of four or five shows into the competition segment. By that time, I’d caught McPheever and I couldn’t turn back.

I spent two or three hours this morning scouring the net for clips of interviews, news of what the Idols are doing next, and trying to talk myself out of wanting to go to the American Idol concert this summer. I dislike the elimination aspect a LOT, and I loved the finale with all the Idols back and performing together and just having fun. Now I really really want to go to the concert. Really really badly. Someone talk me out of this! Or, alternately, agree to go with me.

Yeah, that would work. So how about it? August 13th at Savvis? I’d have to come back from Texas for that, but I’d probably do it. That’s how obsession works. Or else September in Austin. For that I’d have to drag my livejournal friend from Houston, though, and a) Houston’s a long way from Austin (although she loves Austin and might do it, and b) I’m not sure she’d want to go. But tickets are on sale now, and I’m sure they’re going fast, so if I don’t decide soon, my decision might get made for me against my will.

In related news, Steven Spielberg wants to meet with Kat! Woohoo! In other, less fun news, her album probably won’t be recorded and released for like six months.

Is it a full moon?

Okay, today at work I have had:

A late return claim (the check was deposited in AUGUST, and banks only have like 10 days to return something…not NINE MONTHS), which was sent to us the wrong way in the first place, and the person at the other bank has no idea what to do with it…and neither do I, since I haven’t done a late return claim for like six months because they’re rare and usually the senior clerk does them, but she’s on vacation.

A check that was written for $400.00 but encoded as $4000.00, which was more than the customer had in their account, so it hit the “insufficient funds” report, which means Bookkeeping gets it, which means I get to do the adjustment instead of the normal person who handles encoding errors.

A “raw” return item, which is an item that we have to return (because our customer’s account is closed in this case, and thus we can’t pay the item), but we can’t tell which bank deposited the item, so we have to handle it through the Federal Reserve system.

Normally, I might get one of these things a month. If that. I think in the year that I’ve been doing adustments, I’ve had three raw items, four encoding errors on return items, and maybe two late return claims. All three in one day? Unprecedented. Not to mention the late return is going to be very ugly, because it was messed up before we even got it. Normally I spend maybe ten-fifteen minutes a day on return adjustments. Return adjustments are twice as confusing as normal ones. Me = not happy camper.

(Only forty minutes and I can leave…only forty minutes and I can leave…and watch American Idol…and House…TV makes everything seem better…)

Stop the World…I Want to Get Off

I’m resenting work so much right now. Not so much my actual work, but just the fact of work. There’s always a low level of job-related discontent bubbling within me, but knowing that I’m going back to school this fall is making it exponentially worse. Especially now that I’ve got my class schedule set and a lease signed for my apartment. I’ve mentally quit my current job and having to physically come in and work is annoying the crap out of me.

Reasons Today Rocked

Reasons today rocked:

  • Hot wings at Culpeppers
  • As a related item, eating lunch outside for the first time this year
  • Walking in Forest Park, in an area I don’t usually go to (I’m a Grand Basin junkie, but I thought I’d check out some of the other park areas)
  • Getting an article I’m writing for a webzine about half-finished (major breakthrough, as I’ve been procrastinating through research for a week and a half)
  • Being highly amused by a couple trying to unload a very heavy motorcycle off the back of their pickup–their “ramp” (aka a two-by-four) kept falling off
  • Belle and Sebastian CD on the way home
  • The rain not starting until after I got home, and after dark
  • Catching up on 24, House, and How I Met Your Mother
  • Finding a book that I think will finally help me understand PHP and MySQL…maybe
  • Finding an FTP extension for Firefox that seems to work better than the Dreamweaver one, which has been crashing DW constantly lately
  • Beating a boss level on XIII that’s kept me stuck for a few weeks (I won’t let myself buy any more games until I finish this one–my “stuck in the middle of” stack is getting astronomical)

So, yeah. Successful day. Tomorrow: church, sheperding groups fellowship, delving past installing PHP into actually using it, and possibly the last four eps of Arrested Development, which I’ve been saving, but really, it may be time to let go.

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