Category Archives: the ongoing saga of my job

randomness, the ongoing saga of my job 2 Comments

Blah Blah Bloopity Bloo™

Can’t get excited about doing stuff at the computer. Can’t seem to peel my ass off this chair. Guess I’ll blog.

Today at work was my first day of manning the phones. Sky Financial Centers call the team line with loan questions and issues, and we (supposedly) answer them. I actually feel that I did fairly well. Sure, I had to put probably 70% of my callers on hold for a minute or five while I got the right answer for them, but for all but a few, I did finally get them the right answer. It wasn’t nearly as nerve-wracking as I thought it would be. And everyone gave me a big “I told you so” when the day was over.

That’s OK… tomorrow, Scott (the other new guy) gets to be on phones. 😛

*interrupted by Chase Manhattan Bank calling for Aaron*

(Bitch of it is, I think Aaron might actually have a Chase card—I know I do—so I couldn’t really yell at the Indian dude I just dashed upstairs to answer.)

Perhaps later I’ll detail all the housewifey things I did this weekend, and all the garage sale finds we scored. In the meantime, though, I will point all of you to Dooce’s site. I know it’s creepy to feel an almost-acquaintanceship with a complete stranger based upon her writing style and choices of subject, but Dooce here really seems like someone I’d be OK with. Even though she’s a skinny ho. (And I use that in the kindest of ways. She doesn’t actually look like a ho.)

I’ve gotta get up and do something else. Maybe I’ll compile my latest CD project, The 90’s: Volume 2, set that to burn, then go upstairs and do some yoga or read a magazine or play Tony Hawk or SSX3 or something. I’ve gotta do something. Blah.

photography, the ongoing saga of my job 2 Comments

New stuff for Diana

Well, the 2X teleconverter arrived today, dusty but in otherwise new condition. Nothing my little lens brush with the air-puff thingy on it couldn’t handle. Wanted to go try out my new lens combo, but it was already getting toward evening when I got around to it, and there wasn’t enough light left outside. Damn that camera physics, anyway. There’s nothing to really photograph in my immediate neighborhood that would benefit from the use of a teleconverter, anyhow—I just wanted to test it out. Ah, well. Maybe some other time.

Thanks to Meijer Non-Drowsy Severe Cold medication, my severe cold is getting a little less so. I no longer have that hacking, phlegmy cough, but my nose still drips like a broken faucet. Sort of. I slept for freakin’ 10 or 11 hours last night, so that helped a little, then I got the cold medicine over my lunch break today, which has helped a lot. Hopefully I’ll be better by Saturday’s class reunion.

Now, about my new job…
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drumcorps, the ongoing saga of my job 2 Comments

Toledo Drum Corps

I’m crashing early tonight, so I’m going to keep it brief.

I don’t think I mentioned it here yet, but I got a new job within Sky Bank. As of today, I’m working in Loan Corrections, and driving 15 or 20 minutes to work across town instead of 30-35 minutes down to BG. So far, I have no complaints… except having to be at work at 7am this morning to unpack my desk and get everything situated. That, plus the fact that there’s very little beginner work coming in for me to work on. I think it’ll be cool once I learn everything I need to know, though. It’ll be a while, I’m sure, since there are so many different functions that Loan Corrections does.

On Saturday night, I headed out to UT’s Glass Bowl to watch the first drumcorps show of the season. Arrived early—was planning to meet Garza and his group at 6:45 by the ticket booth, and arrived at 6:20 instead—and got to schmooze with several people I hadn’t expected to see. A couple techs (instructors) from Northern Aurora, the first corps I marched; a couple alumni; a couple members of the LakeShoremen; and my high school band director. I shit you not. We must have talked for a good ten or 15 minutes or so. Very cool.

Oh, and the nice lady at the Bluecoats souvenir booth recognized me! Sure, she might have gotten help from the “Diana” embroidered on my jacket and the 1997 Bluecoats member shirt I was wearing, but hey. Even if she did cheat with context clues (which I don’t think she did), she gave me the best compliment ever: she told me that she recognized me because I hadn’t changed  much.

Bless you, Souvie Booth Volunteer Lady, bless your pea-pickin’ heart. Little did you know that I gained 50 pounds after I left corps, and only just recently lost it again.

the ongoing saga of my job

Be afraid. Be very afraid…

…of Diana’s cooking.

Tomorrow is the First Annual Building-Wide Potluck at the Sky Service Center in BG. It’s a fundraiser for the Relay For Life team—they’re participating in the upcoming relay at BG City Park to fight cancer. The organizers had wanted everybody to sign up for the potluck last week, so they’d know how many participants there would be, but only four people signed up by the deadline. So, to keep the thing alive (hey, I like food, even if I can’t eat half of it), I asked Aaron what I could make, and he came up with crock-pot chicken wings with low-carb BBQ sauce. Good idea! So, I signed up.

Of course, as soon as I signed up, the event organizers took the list around to all the departments and specifically asked if anyone was planning to bring food to the potluck. Turns out that half the building actually was planning to bring something, but didn’t want to commit to a specific dish a week in advance. Now there’s something like thirty different dishes in the potluck. Hey, that’s cool.

So, I just got done browning the wings, and they’re now sitting in my spiffy crock-pot with the removable crock, waiting to be smothered in Carb Well BBQ and put on to cook overnight. I really hope they turn out OK.

I always have a “thing” about my cooking not being very good, even though most of the time whatever I make turns out just fine. I had a couple mishaps in high school (how was I to know the pasta pizza would keep cooking if I turned off the heat and left it in the oven to keep warm?) and during the beginnings of my relationship with Aaron (mental note: corn starch only thickens if the heat is turned on; and upon turning the heat on, all the extra corn starch you put into the sauce in your confusion will create a fascinating tumor in your chicken paprikash). But, for the most part, I do OK when I cook. I leave most of the cooking to Aaron, though, and he seems to be fine with that. For now, anyway. 🙂

I will return tomorrow with a report on the success of my crock-pot chicken wings.

longhand, spirituality, the ongoing saga of my job

Journaling and such

I had an interesting idea today. I had brought my sketch journal to work instead of a book to keep me occupied during breaks and lunch, so I ended up writing a journal entry. And I thought, why shouldn’t I scan in some of my random journal pages that I have in various notebooks, in addition to some of the more memorable journal entries from my “real” journals in the past? So, as my first entry, non-interesting though it may be, I offer to you May 7, 2004.

I also had the most fascinating conversation with a co-worker today. I don’t think anyone from work reads my LJ, so I think it’s safe to talk about it—I won’t be “outing” Mike as a non-Christian, which, yes, would be a bad thing in bible-belt BG.

Wow, I just stole my own thunder. How lame is that?

Anyway, in our weekly department meeting, I mentioned that I’d be heading out to the Waterville Community Garage Sale this weekend. Now, Mike tends to come down to my cube and talk to me, anyway, since he noticed that Deb and I are so isolated, being in a different room than the rest of the department. (Given the cliqueishness of some people, though, we prefer it that way.) But today, he came down to ask about the garage sale. Turns out that he likes to thrift, too, which is cool. We got talking about what we look for, and I found out he’s a Medieval buff, collects Renaissance-related stuff and cast iron and things like that.

So, he drifted back to his own cube in the other room, and after lunch I got an e-mail from him. Funny shit—all sorts of whacked out pictures from around the net. I plan to post them on my page eventually. After that, he stopped past my cube again to ask what I thought of those pictures, and just to say hi before he went off to clock out for his own lunch.

And we ended up talking for an hour.

The conversation ranged from my soy candles to essential oils to herbs… then we got into a discussion about what he’d printed off to read during lunch: some Norse mythology, an epic poem about Odin. From which point we got talking about cultural history and mythology, which morphed into religion, of course. We were kind of feeling each other out (so to speak) about how far to go with the conversation. He’d mention symbols and runes and how often they’re misused, so I’d mention people’s misconceptions of the five-pointed star and its various meanings, so he’d mention how those meanings were explained to him, and so on. Eventually we both discovered that we consider ourselves non-Christians, but are kind of “in the closet” about it publicly, due to everyone’s misconceptions of paganism. That wasn’t all we talked about, though—we also discussed the Ren Fests and SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) and Goth Night at Uptown and “dabblers” in Wicca and other poseurs in the counterculture. Anyway, I told him I’d be up for a double-date to one of the Ren Fests this summer.

Just to clarify, I don’t consider myself an all-out Pagan or Wiccan or what have you. I don’t believe in The Great Horned God as an actual entity whom I could call to assist me, no more than I believe that the Judeo-Christian God (whose name I do still have enough respect for not to put into writing) actually follows our daily lives. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe that a god may have had a hand in creating our world/universe, or that I don’t believe in an afterlife of some sort. Honestly, I’m just not sure, and I won’t be until I die. At any rate, just the fact that I no longer believe that Jesus was the Son of God would be enough to ostracize me from many circles.

In other news, I relocated the credit card that was lost on my desk at home, and managed to order Mom a Mother’s Day present. (Mom, I hope you haven’t found my LJ yet… but if you have, Happy Mother’s Day!)

P.S. – If you haven’t checked out my webpage lately, I’ve got some new sketches up. The U-Haul rut photos are also posted in the Photos section, if you haven’t looked at those yet. Good stuff.