Mikachu · nu

What could possibly scare me? Math. Yes, math. Math and I don’t get along. Throughout my school years, it was my weakest subject because I just couldn’t¹ understand the more complicated equations and such. Why would it scare me now? I want to start college. Unless you count my training in the Air Force, I don’t have any actual college under my belt at the tender age of 24. I’m pretty sure I’d like to get my degree in meteorology or atmospheric sciences, but the prerequisites for those programs involve a lot of advanced-ish math. It’s very intimidating! Phrases and items like equivalent fractions mean nothing to me right now.

I received poor grades in my math classes in school. I could understand more visual things like bar graphs, but if you tried to get me to make sense of prime factorization, it was just about impossible. Sure, a lot of my grade was affected by the fact that I didn’t do my homework², but a big part of it that I was so intimidated and discouraged by numbers that I just shut myself off. I really should have sought out tutoring. I know I’ll definitely need to when I start taking math classes in college, because not only does my future career intentions ride on it, but the money and time I’m investing in something that’s essentially elective, but costly and necessary.

I’ve always thought of weather as a mix between science, math and art. How art? While certain events can be forecast with the help of how predictable the event is and a little with a probability calculator, there’s always the chance that it’ll go off and do whatever the hell it wants, without notice or warning. Tornadoes are such an event, and people in the Mid-West are more than familiar with that. Fog in San Francisco is an event you could set your watch to, but even the formation of a tornado can be hard as hell to forecast with enough warning time to give people in order for them to get to safety. I’m excited by how beautiful weather is and interested in how predictable and unpredictable it can be. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t dive in! My fear of math really needs to be tackled and conquered!

What is more exciting to write about than a slightly more-than-average day of mine? There is sleep, then there is waking up, then there is driving around, then there is going to work, then there is singing karaoke at a bar. It doesn’t sound enthralling, but today was what I would call a good day. Who doesn’t like an average day that just ends up being good in the simplest ways, right? The little things, people.

After dropping the husband off at work, I decided to stop by Bath & Body Works to pick up some more antibacterial hand soap since that shit’s always on sale. The other reason was to buy refills for my scent portable for the car. I was tired of it smelling all musty like my late grandparents’ condo whenever I got in, started it and turned on the air. I walked in on what was, apparently, their first day playing Christmas music and having all of their holiday-related displays up & out. I’m one of those people who find it excessive when Christmas music is starting to play the day after Halloween as opposed to the day after Thanksgiving. When the hell did that happen? I could’ve sworn Christmas and winter holiday shit like that didn’t start until after Thanksgiving! I can’t complain too much since I love the scent of fall & winter & Christmas. Needless to say my car smells like winter now, thanks to Fresh Balsam I bought the scent in the form of their scented fragrance oil over a month ago when Angel & Kristen were out here in SD for a few days and we browsed through B&BW.

Once I got to work, I had realized I’d forgotten to apply any cover-up to my neck to hide the bruise left from a particularly amorous husband from a couple days ago. It’s not obviously as far as hickeys go, but it’s still bruising and stippling on my neck above my collar I asked one of the coworkers I’m real friendly with if it was obvious and she played it down. Thankfully none of the management noticed, or at least didn’t say anything. Work was fairly hectic even with the random moments of slowness we experienced. I was told by one of my coworkers that he’s always glad when he sees me on the line-up when he’s working because I’m a hard worker. “I’m serious,” he said, even, since I gave him a chuckle and a look that pretty much said “Yeah, right…” I’m sure I’ve mentioned it, but at my previous store, there wasn’t a lot of morale boosting going on. More deprecating stuff usually. I think it made me a better associate, though, since I strove to please even though it was virtually impossible in that environment. It was the parent I could never please, if I ever had one.

On top of that, I’m beginning to feel a better kinship with my coworkers. Hopefully I’ll be able to move into hanging out with them outside of work soon. I need some friends out here. I want to be able to go out and have fun without the husband and without being by myself. I have no problem going out by myself, though. I have no problem eating at a restaurant or seeing a movie alone. It’s really freeing once you realize you don’t have to worry about anyone else when you’re doing those things. Just enjoy the solitude and people-watching

After work, I had to wait for the car to give my dead phone enough juice to call the husband and find out where he was so I could pick him up after I was held over for a few extra hours. He was at a bar¹ near his work. It ended up being a bar I had Yelped when moving down here and I was looking for karaoke bars. It’s kind of a dive and it’s big with the Navy & Marine guys, so lots of guys with buzz cuts and shit. I walked in on the husband singing karaoke, which I could hear from the parking lot. I knew it was him the moment I opened the car door I managed one song in before they discontinued karaoke for the night. The DJ even said I “didn’t suck”! I laughed since that was kind of awesome after his bad comments about the previous groups of girls who went up to sing Spice Girls and Cyndi Lauper and pretty much did suck. Just as we were leaving, an older black gentleman started talking to the husband and ended up tickling him. That was beyond amusing!

Now Daylight Savings Time is over and I sent a neener-neener-neener message to Kristen about it². Good night, all!

Today I was called in early for work because a manager had an emergency. I’m not sure why me, but hey, if I can get there, I’ll take the couple extra hours. It worked in my favor anyway since I’d be able to pick up the husband from work since I got off earlier and he wouldn’t have to shell out the cash for a taxi home.

What should happen a little over an hour after I start working? We lose significant power to our store. Our grills, fryers, shake machines, and air conditioner stop working. It was a slow shut down of everything we needed to sustain business. It was quite strange because it started with the shake machine not dispensing shakes, the monitors for the drive-lane cameras flickering and eventually the fryers were going cold and the A/C wasn’t blow cold air on my head anymore. The low drone the store usually has from all the machines disappeared and even with a store full of customers, it was too quiet.

Unfortunately, we had a store & drive-lane full of customers. We managed to get out a handful of orders before we had to just go ahead and refund money to customers. I was working the hand-out window for the drive-thru and had to be the bearer of bad news to a couple of cars that we couldn’t get their orders out to them and would have to refund their money. The first car was agitated as hell and asked if we could give them gift cards or something. I’m sorry, but while we try and make the customers as happy as possible, this situation was just one of those things where we couldn’t do much more than give them refunds and our apologies. I compare(d) it to an airliner expected to give customers what they want because the weather was bad. It’s not something we did and had control over, so, I’m sorry? Not to mention, the hours of lost business we had due to the power outage! It’s Labor Day weekend on a Saturday afternoon! Crap!

The power was out for a good couple of hours, so we had to pack everything with trash bags of ice that would spoil if they got too warm (milk, shake mix, meat, our dressing…). We had to dump out the shake machine, and yes… we partook in the “unusable” shake mix. We took to cleaning the store, stocking it up and waiting while one of the company’s handymen figured out what was wrong, and subsequently waiting for the power company to fix the issues with the power the store wasn’t getting. It was an interesting and kind of fun couple of hours, laughing with coworkers and kind of doing nothing when there was no more to do.

There’s only one other instance that I’ve experienced a store closure, at my old location, when we had a sewage back-up. We weren’t closed for nearly as long, though, since the problem was actually relatively minor and we didn’t have to wait for things to heat back up and such.

What kind of interesting things have happened in your place of employment, if any?

I’m back home in SD. The husband was out all day before our drive home with friends at a pub watching the damn World Cup. That’s cool, whatever floats his boat, but I thought we’d be headed back down earlier than 2pm! I mean, having to be at work by 4:30pm is kind of crunch and the later it got, the more likely it was we’d hit some sort of traffic. We hit patches of it and there were idiots in the fast & carpool lanes going slower than 60MPH which was ridiculous. Slow traffic stay RIGHT, assholes! Luckily I got home with enough time to hit the toilet, change quickly and head the 5 minutes down the freeway to work with a few minutes to spare.

We’ll be needing some maintenance to the car SOON. The brakes sound AWFUL and while we haven’t hit the average mileage for the first brake job, we’ve driven this car through a lot of LA traffic, cross-country and through all sorts of up & down terrain coming up & down between LA & SD. Not to mention some of the belts need to be replaced since they’re looking aged and cracked. We definitely don’t want something more expensive to occur because we neglected to change that shit out.

I’ve had my new laptop since, I think, March? Somehow the power adapter cord has melted itself through (or maybe it got under some other hot running electronic) and tonight the laptop wouldn’t acknowledge that fact that it was plugged in. Lo-behold, it’s melted enough through that it’s fricken smoking through the melted rubber/plastic on the cord. *sigh* Looks like I’ll be making a trip to Fry’s tomorrow morning since I’ll be wanting to use my laptop while I’m on vacation (hello movies!). Though it’ll only be half useful without Internet access, having a dead battery with no way to charge it would render it useless. It’d make for a great weight for when it gets windy, though!

So now I’m currently using a little battery power as possible (dim screen, no fancy desktop effects, as few open programs as needed). After I take care of some online business, I’ll be off to take a shower, get some clothes put together for my vacation and head to bed to wake up early for a doctor’s appointment. I have no hope of doing laundry efficiently here since our all-in-one machine takes forever with ONE small load! I’ll have to lug a bunch of dirty (though some clean!) to my parents’ house when my brother comes to pick me up. Thankfully they’ve got the family-sized efficient machines that are only a few years old (at least, the washer’s pretty damn new)

PS: I have a new theme up. I’ve made some personalized adjustments to it but I’m still working on it as a whole! I need to make changes to have it reflect a personal blog and not a “magazine” style website, since that’s what the theme was meant for. I can do this! It’s not like I’m making a theme from scratch and no experience

The latest I’ve worked is 11pm with my current employer. I’ve never closed and the earliest I’ve worked is 7:30am or so… so technically I guess I’ve helped open, but not nearly as early as others. Sometimes after I’m off work at night, I’ll look at the clock a few hours later and realize we’re still open and my coworkers are still at it! I was actually let off a little under an hour early tonight. Early in the week are generally our least busy days.

You know what’s a very interesting series to watch? The History of Sex on the History channel. They go through the beginning of humanity through current times. There are so many interesting things that occurred sex-wise early on in history. It’s astounding, sometimes! The ignorance and surface prudishness of even early doctors, and the amazing hidden perversity experienced by both sexes is just… awesome to learn about!

The Dodgers are seriously disappointing me now. They’ve fallen into 3rd fricken place, behind the Giants, for our division. It’s causing me to lose any hope that they’ll perform well for us against the Yankees this Sunday! I want to see them kick Yankee butt! Just going to the game will be pretty awesome. It’s the gift my cousin is giving my husband for his birthday and myself plus my dad get to go along for the fun. I’m excited! I wanted to get him an authentic Lasorda jersey but they’re 1) expensive and 2) hard to find! Replicas are much easier to get your hands on, but I wanted the real thing… I eventually want to get myself a Piazza Dodgers jersey Those are even harder to find! There are plenty of Mets jerseys for him

Gosh, I need money. I need to win the lottery! It would help my chances if I actually played the lottery, huh?