it's days like these that keep me on my winning streak

I had to work this morning. Which wasn't as bad as you'd think. Hallmark doesn't really have any big specials for the weekend. And all I really had to do was take down the Thanksgiving stuff and put out the rest of the Christmas stuff. It only took about four hours and then I was free for the rest of the day.

I decided to run to Best buy to see if they had the re-released boys Like Girls CD. Since it was about 1pm when I got there, it was busy but not swamped. I walked in, grabbed a couple CDs, paid and got out in under ten minutes. Not too bad. Then I went to Wal-Mart. I went to get conditioner, allergy meds and goop for my hair. And I ended up spending $102. =/ But I needed a new pair of jeans. And a hockey jersey. And three DVDs. Seriously, I have no will power.

So I was sitting here watching the Law & Order marathon and it was nagging & nagging me that I should go back to Best Buy. I finally gave in and did, where I bought the first two seasons of The Wire on DVD. But they were 50% off! That's a damn good deal. I'm just not going to allow myself to watch them until I've gotten through Series 3 of Doctor Who. Because that's a TV priority right now.

I normally have a lot of Hallmark rage, but I have extra amounts this week. Besides having to work during the Open House last weekend and dealing with the old ladies and their 8 million coupons. I'm stuck working all day again this Saturday. Barack Obama's campaign is having a party on Saturday as they open their Minnesota office. And Obama himself will be in Des Moines for a rally. And then Al Franken is having a rally at Neighborhood House on Sat to celebrate Veteran's Day. I'd love to go to any of these events. Instead I'll be couped up with the geriatric crowd. *sigh* However, some of you folks might be interested and able to go.

I'll also apparently be dog sitting this weekend. Which kind of sucks since it means I'll need to be in bed by 10:30 since that's their normal bed time and I can't break the system. At least my parents have their wireless internet setup now so I can just bring my laptop to bed.

It's taken me over an hour just to write these two paragraphs. And the scary thing is that this isn't the really really busy time yet. I don't even want to know what things will be like in a month. =/

( in which I prepared for the Matty Nay show )

I kind of feel like I'm in Bizarro World at work today. First, I got an email from someone at UnitedHeathcare - a MAJOR health plan in this country - that's partly written in chat speak. I don't have any understanding on how this is acceptable in a professional organization. And then someone from our Louisville office sent out a couple emails that were completely rude and condescending and when someone emailed her back to clarify what had been done wrong, she just sent back an even ruder email instead of giving any kind of help. I don't think she realizes just how many people those emails were sent out to. I don't think this is going to end well for her.

Stephen Kellogg just sent out an email to say that they're playing in the Midwest this week before continuing on their national headlining tour. We're not part of a national tour? Is the Midwest suddenly its own country? *confused*

I have today off, which is kind of a lifesaver. Work has been driving me nuts. We can totally tell that one of our projects is going to completely crash & burn, and there's not much we can do about it. =/ It's my first client too, so that's not good.

Anyhow, my list of things to do today:
- Laundry
- Go to Borders
- Go to Wal-Mart
- Lunch with my mom
- Talk to my brother in Korea (I missed him - maybe we'll talk when I get home tonight)
- Make a new post in the seekrit community
- Go see Matty Nay tonight and laugh my ass off

I had to work last night so I missed the hockey game. =/ But we won! And Boogaard already got in a huge fight. Nice! (yes, I already made an icon of it - shut up)

I can't even begin to go into how many ways The Office was MADE OF WIN last night. SO WONDERFUL! But Dwangela! *heart breaks*


Dear humidity,

Look, we had a nice summer fling. Sure you were a little too clingy and smothering sometimes. It wasn't awful though. But now summer is over. It's time for you to give it up.

No love, me

Ow. I obviously slept weird last night and pinched something in my neck. Again. I can only turn my head to my shoulder, and even that hurts. Looking behind me is definitely out. No money for a massage this week though. Any volunteers to give me one? ;)

This week's theme over in the Seekrit Music community is "Music We Grew Up With." I downloaded a bunch of stuff I haven't listened to in years so I can post it. Stuff I only have on vinyl or maybe cassette. It's terrible that I can listen to it and still remember all the words. Also, looking at the list of stuff I'm going to post makes it apparent that there is something mentally wrong with me. Seriously, it's all over the place. You'll see when I start posting it later this week.

This weekend was pretty boring. I had to work at Hallmark all weekend. Boo. And I had to help my mom set up the new ornament display. Ugh. I finally grabbed the book from her and started doing it myself since I was tired of her bitching. It didn't help that I was crampy and tired and cranky. But it got done and actually looks kind of cute. I also had to check in all the new ornament stock and pull all the orders for customers. No one else at the store is organized enough to be able to do it. Including our manager. =/

Also, listen. If you want to stand there and open all of the sound cards, whatever. Have fun. But for God's sake, don't come up to the counter and open them directly in my face and go on and on about how great that song is. Yes, I've heard it before. Yes, I've seen the card before. Can you just shut it? Please?

Also also, I will never ever get the women who carry around those fucking suitcases and then have to lug them onto the counter and dig through them for 5 minutes and take all kinds of junk out just to find their credit card, all the while going on about how they hate that purse because it has too many pockets or they can't find anything or needs to be cleaned out. No one is forcing you to carry that thing around. Clean it out, decide what you really need and carry a smaller purse. Really, it's possible. Sometimes I even go out with only what's in my pockets.

Also also also? Our store is next to a Curves. Can I please put out a plea to the Curves women? If you want to shop at our store after your workout, that's fine. But for the love of God, go out to your car first and put your workout stuff in there before coming into the store. Because carrying your smelly shoes around our store? Kind of disgusting. Putting your smelly shoes on our counter when you're checking out? Really disgusting. Setting your DIRTY SOCKS on the counter? Completely unacceptable. And this has happened more than once.

So, other than getting Hallmark rage, I also hung out with my family this weekend. I stopped by on Friday to see how Earl was doing and he was still kind of bad. He was shaking and didn't want to be touched. But he was better on Saturday and let me scratch him under the chin for a little while. He even came out from under the bed to see me. Riley is also doing much better. He's back to ignoring me at will. Stubborn dog.

I spent an infuriating amount of time trying to get my parent's cable modem to work with a wireless router. Comcast gave them some new modem and it works like shit. I never did get it to work with the router. But I did finally get the modem to recognize my mom's laptop when we had it connected by wire, so we called DJ. It was 10:30am there and he was just getting up. Unfortunately, his webcam was broken so I didn't get to see him, but I did talk to him for a while. It's some sort of Thanksgiving-type holiday in Korea this week, so he was taking a vacation to some tropical island with some of the other teachers at his school. He's going to learn how to surf! Sounds like he's having a great time. He's definitely not home sick.

Other than that, I watched a lot of TV and futzed around on the computer. Kind of a typical weekend.

My *happy dance* moment of the day: Pre-ordering Shooter Jennings' new CD The Wolf! Along with a vinyl copy too! It comes out on Oct 23rd, which is three days before we're seeing him here in Mpls. I'm very excited! You too can pre-order a copy right here.

I will hopefully have my new work laptop tomorrow. CubeMate in the Closet got his today and he's been showing off how fast he can run things now. Jerk. =( Oh yeah?!? Well, now people are going to expect you to do work while I'll still have the excuse of having a shitty computer. ("Yeah, I would, but my laptop's frozen again" gets said a lot) I have a bunch of extra programs that need to get loaded though and the IT dude didn't quite have mine ready yet.

Tonight is the Jon McLaughlin/Sara Bareilles and someone else show. I'm kind of too exhausted to go to a show, but I'll be there anyways. At least the Varsity has plenty of tables.

My Cube looks SO Office-tastic now!

You know what's fun? Being woken up at 3am, AGAIN, by a terrible storm and losing power, AGAIN, and having to get ready for work by flashlight. AGAIN. Anytime you want to quit this, Mother Nature, that would be okay. Really. I would love to have a night I can sleep all the way through.

I am wearing my Team Franken shirt today. We're supposed to go on some team building thing (to a bar) today, so I wore it for that. But I'm hoping that I can maybe ditch out since I want to go sit with Riley. I actually might try to just get the whole afternoon off. I'll see what my boss says when he gets in.

Ohhhhhhh, today hurts. I think I'm going to give in and go buy a Red Bull.

Do you work at or have you ever worked at a bookstore? ( This is totally for you! )

WHY IS IT ONLY WEDNESDAY? This week needs to go much faster!

I have finally given in and I'm going to the doctor today to have my wrist looked at. Usually I can deal with the pain in my wrist, but it's been really bad for the last couple weeks. Like going from a pain factor of an occasional 2 to a nearly constant 6. It's bad enough that I'm worried there's something else wrong. Taking 4 Advil every fours hours and wearing my brace at night hasn't really been helping and that's kind of bad. And I'm stuck hugging my arm to my chest to help keep my wrist immobilzed. So yes, I'm going to the doctor. But that doesn't mean I'm happy about it. Unless I get some nice painkillers.

This weekend was quite lovely. Well, except for working at Hallmark both days. Since I have my new external hard drive, I've been downloading music like whoa and added around another 1,000 songs to my iTunes over the past three days. =/ I don't know how this happens.

Sat night was duckduck's birthday celebration. There was good food, protein cake, dripping and burning shuttlecock, some very inappropriate conversation and lots of wonderful people. It was lovely! I made sure to take some photos with people since I don't seem to have a lot of photos with my "home" friends. I'm going to get them printed off so that I can add them to all the photos of my "away" friends on my desk.

Oh, I know it was mentioned that folks would like to view Done the Impossible. I would love to do a group viewing but I can't really have people over to my place. So if anyone would like to volunteer their location, I would be happy to bring the movie! I have the next two Sundays off, if that works at all.

Both Rock of Love and Scott Baio is 45...and Single were great last night. Adding Hogan Knows Best into the mix next week may kill me with awesomeness. And then Man Band starts up in like three weeks. VH1 does indeed own my soul.

I don't know why, but I thought this week was going to be quiet. Until I looked at the calendar and realized that Poison/RATT is Wed night, Friday is my brother's going away party and both my aunt and stardiver will be in town this weekend. Happily though, I'm off from both jobs Thurs-Sun!

Wow. I was just at Chipotle picking up dinner and they had Kasey Chambers' "Wayward Angel" playing. I honestly stood agape for a moment. I've never just happened to hear Kasey while I've been out and about before.

I don't know how I didn't know this before today, but Wedding Wars will be available on DVD on Tuesday. Yes, it was hokey and dorky. But Simon Tam shacking up with Uncle Jesse? Yes please!

I had a customer rant I was going to write, but it's not worth the effort. Just don't be an asshole to the people trying to help you, okay? It's not that hard to figure out. And for crying out loud! SHOWER. Please.