Rave: GLOWING evaluations from my Attending physicians while on rotation. Rave: On vacation! Rave: Fantastic Fish tacos. Ole!
Rant: I am waiting on three companies to return NDAs to me before I can set a sales demo. How fucking difficult is it to read, sign, and return one NDA? Fuck your legal team. Rave: Headed down to Lake of the Ozarks tomorrow. I am packing extra beer and sunblock.
Rave: Perc got adopted! I hope he has a happy rest of his life. (The reason I went with a bird adoption agency is that they carefully screen potential new owners, make them attend classes on bird care and do home inspections.) From the adoption agencies web site: Rant: What the fuck happened to his cage? That's been his house for 18 years dammit. Rant 2: When that picture was taken he was not a happy boy, he ALWAYS had a mischievous gleam in his eye. He looks absolutely miserable.
It sucks seeing someone else write a description of your "Child." Yes, Percy loves music, but he loves live music. If he became noisy or agitated all I had to do was grab a guitar or sit down at the piano and everything was right in his world. Perc grew up in house filled with music, mainly his drunk "Dad" playing an instrument as he sat on my shoulder and encouraged me. He got quite the musical education from classical to heavy metal. He didn't care what I played, as long as I was playing he was happy. He would "Sing" along in his own little language, flap his wings, yell out squeals of delight, and dance. My boy loves music. They also made no mention of his vocabulary. Percy and I could carry on a simple conversation: Percy: "SCREEEEECH" Me: "What the hell boy?" Percy: "You be quiet bird." Me: "That's right. You be quiet bird." Percy: "Night, night little bird." Me: "Yes. Night, night. You go to sleep." With my vocabulary you'd think he'd cuss like a drunken sailor that had just been kicked in the balls, but I was very careful with my language around him. He didn't know a single swear word or angry phrase like "Shut up." And then his diet...I spoiled the shit out of him. He always had a dish full of seeds, 95% of which ended up all over my living room floor. He wanted to eat what I was eating, fuck his seeds, so I indulged him with mashed potatoes, pasta, and whatever else I happened to be eating. I love the little guy, I hope his new parents understand what a clever, smart and sometimes infuriating little guy he can be.
Rant: Woke up at 4am for a webinar on Malaysian regs, which is being given by a guy with a speech impediment. While I'm not judging his persistent ehhhhhhhs, it is four in the fucking morning. I can't focus on anything but his ehhhhhhhs. What a waste of perfectly good sleeping time. Rave: Flying home tonight. Washington is nice, but it'll be nice to be back in a place where the signs don't all have to read "no smoking, no pets, no guns".
Rant: It's only 8:30 Thursday morning and already I am insanely jealous of the people going to Comic Con. Just one of the reasons, this tweet by Amber Nash:
I dropped the children off at their babysitter's house this morning because she couldn't come get them because she was throwing up, so that was fun. I had to fire someone at 8AM and Mrs. Noland's grandmother is having surgery in about an hour, three weeks shy of her 101st birthday, so that's not good. I'm looking for a plague of frogs or locusts to start raining down on me.
Woke up with cramps from Hell. Forgot to pay my cell and since I was late last month they cut me off. When I pushed the little button I was out of wiper washer stuff in my car. Hit a traffic jam on my way to work. All rants today.
Rave: Austin, TX for the weekend starting tomorrow! Rave: BBQ and food trucks! Rave: It's cooler there than here in upstate NY? Rave/Rant: The reason we're going is to see my wife's best friend's new baby. I foresee a significant lack of sleep from a crying baby this weekend.
Rave: My little step-brother's wife just had their first kid yesterday. I have a new niece. Not a rant or rave, just weird They named her Charlee, pronounced the same as my cat, Charlie, whom they are often around. That won't be confusing at all. Rant: I am the oldest on that side of the family, and even though no one has given me shit for it, I can feel them all silently judging me for not having kids yet.
Rave: Had my first kid two days ago, Eleanor. She's fucking amazing. Super Rave: Was able to get home from Afghanistan in time to see her born, especially since she was early.
Rant: cockroaches. Every year during some of the hottest days, we get a few enormous ones. This morning, I saw one in my office while I was packing up some camera gear, so I murdered him with a piece of my tripod. Broken, splayed legs, guts hanging out - yep, fuck you buddy. So I finished packing up my gear, and when I turned back around to clean up the mess... he was gone. I found him dragging his broken legs and guts across the floor, several feet away. WTF? Fucking zombie cockroaches.
Rave: As a late "Congrats on having a baby" gift, a coworker brought me a bottle of La Fin Du Monde! I love me some good beer. Rave: My son will be 3 months old on Monday. He is the greatest little guy. I might be biased, but not really. He is awesome.
RANT: No vacation pay due to some sketchy reasoning. RAVE: I said fuck it and told them I'm taking a week off anyway. RAVE: Class starts 8/19. All I have left is books, which I can't get yet, my gear, and a bunch of shots. RANT: Shots. Fuck needles. And now I'm going to spoiler some fucking LONG restaurant bullshit, because why the fuck not. Spoiler Our longest-standing boards (sandwiches/grill/fry) guy is a Mexican immigrant who works his ass off. Unfortunately his ego is proportionate to his work ethic, so he's constantly sucking his own dick, making a big deal out of any other person's mistakes, and just generally being a cocky prick. He went on vacation and I covered his shifts for a week. One night, I had to do some detail work I usually don't do, and I put some things back together a bit off. Was a two-minute fix, he mentioned it to me, didn't make a big deal about it, said he'd fix it. FOUR nights later, I come around the corner to hear him going on at length about my mistake to one of the managers, how I don't know how to do anything and etc. This was a two-minute fix, and he had had four nights to fix it. Nope. Easier to leave it so you can bitch about it for half a week. Come to find out that that morning the company lost $600 and hours of wasted time because of a mistake he had made. This added a good dose onto my irritation with him, which had already been building, but I tried to ignore it. Until the next night. We have a coffeemaker at work, one that is rarely used at night, and which I haven't touched in weeks. He decided he wanted coffee. I'm in the back covering a dish shift, and while I'm not swamped I have enough going on to keep me busy. He comes up with this coffeemaker, and it's all molded to hell. Moldy grounds and the mold has grown all over the upper inside around the filter area. He tells me to clean it. I tell him no, I spend enough time cleaning up others' messes and I have real work to do. He tells me I'm a lazy motherfucker and goes on for a minute, general bitching at me as he cleans it. Now, I spent many years living with some very ghetto people. This has sadly rubbed off on me enough that when I get really pissed, it takes a conscious effort to not sound like some chain-wearing trailer park trash. Having not slept the previous night, I was beyond conscious effort, so my response was pretty much "Listen, motherfucker, I'm not here to be your fucking bitch. Just because you're 40-something and still flipping chickens doesn't make you any better than me, so you can fuck off. You want something cleaned? Do it yourself, bitch. The day your name is on the front door (under the words General manager) you can make all the demands you like, until then get the fuck out my ass. Oh, and you can go call and cry to (head boss) right now because I do not give a FUCK." For good measure I spent the rest of the night sarcastically quoting his egotistic comments mixed in with things like "Oh I'm so good at my job I'm gonna go home and suck my own dick" and "Hey look at me, I don't work for less than $14 an hour. Too bad it took me half of my lifespan to get that far." Mature? Not by any standard. Justified given two years of this shit and 24 hours without sleep? I'd like to think so. In the end, it had the desired effect, because he refuses to even look at me. I cannot until spring, to walk out that door and know that aside from filling my stomach or rendering medical assistance I will never set foot into a restaurant again.
Rave: It's amazing how fast the week goes by when you feel great. MEGARAVE! The CO approved el husband's VEERP. VEERP is the early out program. It just has to make it through the mail to the Maryland office to get officially signed off (it is statistically never rejected past the CO). He'll also be able to take terminal leave. We might be back as early as October 7th.
Rant: I found out today that I am going to be working 55-70 hour weeks until the end of September. We just started on a new project and my superiors underestimated how long it is going to take to finish it. We were told that at our current pace it would take 9 months, so I don't see how we will manage to finish it by the deadline even with almost everyone working overtime. To top it off, I will be taking Calculus II at night starting on August 19, since I need it for a graduate program that I want to apply to. There won't be much time for the gym. These next 2 months will be hell. Rave: I will be paid for overtime. I can always use the extra money, even if it won't be a whole lot extra. Rant: I took the GRE on Monday and found it to be a good deal harder than all of the practice tests that took. My math score, which is the one that is most important for me, fell by about 4 points from my average from the practice tests. Rave: My verbal score somehow improved by about 2 points, so at least there's that.
There's a 99% chance I'm getting my heart shattered into a million little pieces in 10 days. I want to throw up.
RANT: Air France canceled our tickets to Istanbul. They sent ONE EMAIL and then canceled them, Boyfriend thought it was just another form of confirmation. Now tickets cost twice as much and we can't afford to go, and I have to cancel all of our hotel reservations and the rental car and, you know, not go to Turkey. FUuck. I honestly can't think of the last time I was this disappointed, and the shitty part of me blames Boyfriend a little, which is just not good. And now I'm sitting at the kitchen table crying, drinking (cheap, bad) wine and feeling sorry for myself.
Rant: My aunt is on new medication that's supposed to help her sleep and keep her calm at night. It's not working. I'm going to punch her doctor in the face next time I see him. Rave?She's become an angry toddler. She gets into everything and then screams bloody fucking hell when I ask her what she's doing. Today I caught her with a bottle of prescription medication in her curious little hands after I turned my head away for a few moments. I was able to divert her attention long enough to take the bottle of pills away without her noticing. Crisis averted. The meds were left over from long ago and accidentally left where she could find them if she looked hard enough. The rules to this game change without warning every day. She's now shaking uncontrollably all day long, constantly thinking she's hungry, bursting out in fits of laughter at inappropriate times, and unable to give warning that she needs to use the toilet, or that she's messed her diaper. She's also constantly asking things like "What about the 6 and 5?" How the fuck do you answer that? I would so love a day or two in the mountains surrounded by trees and serenity. And beer. Lots and lots of beer.
RAVE: The 11/10 Russian girl who lives on my floor. RANT: Her giant Russian oaf of a boyfriend who could tear my arms off and probably will if he catches me staring at her ass again. RANT: Can't stop. RAVE: Sooo worth it.