Thursday, June 30, 2005

I love dogs...

But I truly love John Cusack. And he has a new movie coming out!

Seriously, though, I actually bought a house specifically because I wanted a dog and you can't have a dog in an apartment. Well, not a dog worth having, anyway... Those stupid little yappy rat-dogs that my cat could kill don't count. I bought my house the moment 9/11 happened (war profiteering, anyone?) and yet, no dog. After I graduate, go to England, and get a Jeep, I'll get a dog. Does that sound fair? Actually, I may have to wait until the cat... uh, she may be reading this, so hold that thought.

You know. Cats and dogs. Oil and water. Christians and anyone else. Vinagre and chocolate. Me and "children." Some things just don't mix.

On the other hand, I may have bought a house because I SO HATED living in apartments. My last apartment caused me so much stress (gang members for neighbors, daylight armed break-ins in the neighboring buildings, drug dealers for neighbors, police calling me to find out if anything was worth investigating [I knew many of the Renton cops on a first-name basis], rats, giant hairy spiders) that I actually bought out my lease to leave it. And it isn't as though I could afford to pay a few month's rent to get out! I actually medically needed to leave. It is not a good situation when you cannot sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time because of the noise level and you start having heart palpitations from stress.

Whatever.

The point is that I own a fully-fenced quarter acre and no dog. What the hell?!

But back to John Cusack. I have had some kind of a fixation on him since the early '80s. So naturally, I'm gonna see this new movie. It is called Must Love Dogs, in case you didn't bother to click on that link up there.

Holy crap, my fixation on this guy that I will never meet and who wouldn't know I existed even if I did actually meet him is probably the closest thing to a non-self-destructive relationship that I have ever had. How sad is that?

And speaking of police... My boss's boss (who I used to have a problem with, but now that I see that my boss's assessment of her boss is totally ridiculous and I'm not speaking to her anymore because she is a liar and a backstabber) has talked to all of her friends about me and her ex-husband's best friend, and after her friends and her sister all met me they all agree that I should meet him and we would be like the bestest couple ever... wait a minute, I just lost my train of thought.

More concisely: Michelle and all of her friends think that Darrin and I should meet. He's on the local police force. They keep trying to introduce us, and it keeps not happening. I don't know what to think of the whole situation. I was at a dinner party recently in which the whole group that knew him was harassing him over speaker-phone for not showing up, and based solely on that I would say that he and I would hit it off. He was funny and intelligent and dealt well with harassment. (Those are requirements.) I've also seen pictures, and they were... appealing.

However.

I'm emotionally rather, uh, well, hmmmmm... distant. And I kinda like it that way. The more distant, the better. The more distant, the less chance of being screwed over. Safety net, you know? How awkward would it be to get screwed over by your boss's boss's ex-husband's best friend? That's just a Jerry Springer episode waiting to happen.

Hey, speaking of which, Max and Michelle just got married earlier this month! (Michelle is not my boss's boss. In case you didn't pick up on that.)

Oh, and Darrin owns a Harley. It would never work.

So, I'm thinking Siberian Husky mix. I need a non-human hiking partner, and I figure a dog that can be outside all day long in the cold and snow is probably ideal. The moment I graduate, I'll start looking into it. I also have to finish rebuilding my fence. Whole 'nother story there. Maybe some other day.

Chair Peak and half-frozen Snow Lake, May 28 2005 Posted by Picasa

My stalker

I don't think that I have previously mentioned my stalker.

The dangers of public transportation:
  • Missing your transportion and getting stranded
  • Catching your transportation as planned and getting stuck with icky people for the whole ride

I define icky people as:

  • People who physically invade your space
  • People who won't shut up
  • People who smell like 12 kinds of ass
  • People with diseases that they feel no compulsion to avoid spreading to you by sneezing and couging on everything within a radius of 20 feet
  • Stalkers

I suppose he doesn't technically qualify as a stalker, but he shows great promise. I base this statement on the following quotes:

  • "I want to get to know you better."
  • "Do you have time for coffee?"
  • "Where do you live?"
  • "Are you single?"
  • "What trains do you take every day?"
  • "Are you married?"

Worrisome, no? And this is after exactly one conversation, during which I repeatedly tried to politely shut him up by returning to my beaten-up copy of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Not only did he not take the hint, he asked what the book was about. Try explaining a sci-fi fantasy good-versus-evil Pythonesque apocolyptic novel to a guy who does not get the sci-fi fantasy good-versus-evil Pythonesque apocolyptic genre, and you will find yourself pulling your hair out.

Needless to say, I know which trains he takes, and I no longer take them.

Fourth of July weekend

So, I'm thinking that the weather is going to be a suckfest this weekend, but I'm doing the hike anyway. I want to exhaust myself hiking in the rain up a valley on a trail traversing a towering ridgeline to a tiny campsite next to a gemlike glacier-fed alpine lake in a rocky cirque populated with large predatory animals that I will fend off for three days and two nights with my trekking poles while surviving on little plastic bottles of vodka and Johnny Walker Black and dehydrated beef stroganoff (mmmm... beefy...) and lasagne with no iPod or email or homework or (hopefully) other people. There's nothing like waking up with a bear breathing on your tent to make you feel alive. I'm sick of homework, I'm sick of studying, I'm sick of sitting around getting fat. And no, I don't mean "phat." I mean eating-two-TV-dinners-in-a-row-and-then-a-box-of-Haagen-Daaz-bars kind of fat. I haven't hiked regularly for 9 months, and at my (ahem) advanced age, you can't eat like that if all you do is sit at a computer every waking moment. Last summer, all I did was work and hike, so I could handle eating a 1,500-calorie sandwich for lunch, followed by a box of Girl Scout cookies (the Samoas, of course) and a two-liter bottle of Jolt, but things are not like they were 9 months ago. God, I cannot wait to graduate... I want my life back! I want free time! I want to be able to sleep enough every night! I want to do what I want to do!

Not to mention that I want out of this crap job. But I'm working on that.

I get to go hiking! I get to go hiking! I get to go hiking! Though I know the weather may not be ideal, or even pleasant for that matter, I get giggly and twirly just thinking about it. I'm currently doing an internal happy dance, evidenced only by the inane grin and slightly psychotic glint in my eyes. If a stranger saw me right now, they would be frightened and unnerved in some undefinable way.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I just had a job interview. Woo hoo! I am first in line for a new position within the company. I'm nearly giddy with anticipation. I won't find out if I get it until next week.

If I was the praying type, I'd be praying right now.

Here's the nasty thing, though. I'll have to train my replacement. I am not fond of training, but naturally I will deal with it if I have to. I think that if I leave this position, they will find out just how much I do around here.

And they'll rue the day. Mwah ha ha ha!

Rue the day? Who talks like that?

Lawn fairies

A very strange thing happened on Monday.

I got home. Parked in the garage. Walked into the driveway. Smelled grass. Thought, "hey, someone mowed their lawn." Looked down. Someone had mowed my lawn.

Very strange indeed.

There's a little bit of a backstory to this. Last May, I mowed my lawn. And I had been mowing it about twice a week at that point. In a stunning upset, we stopped getting rain. It was seriously weird. We had a hot, dry summer. The lawn went dormant, so it didn't need mowing. I am not one of those freaks who is willing to run up my water bill to keep the grass green. I water the trees and shrubs, but that's it. Anyway, the hot, dry summer turned to a pleasantly warm, dry fall, and then to a surprisingly mild, dry winter.

Then spring came. And it started to rain. The ski resorts that closed early for lack of snow reopened in March. Oops. Prime grass growing season. Of course, that also meant that the grass was too wet to mow. So it grew and grew. By the time it was dry enough to mow, it was too late. My lawn mower wasn't starting. I borrowed my neighbor's mower, but my grass was too thick to cut. It is currently about armpit deep, but it is too heavy to stand, so it is all laying down. That's just the back yard. The front grows slowly and sparsely, so it is less to cope with. The front yard is the north side of the house - heavy shade and clay for soil.

Anyway, the front yard got weed whacked. My mower is with a neighbor who is fixing it in trade for my old TV. He stopped by one day to see if I was OK because I used to have the nicest yard in the 'hood, and now it looks like the crack house down the road. You'd think nobody lived there based on the "lawn." I told him my sad story (single woman, broken lawn mower, pay cut, undergrad, no free time, boo hoo) and he offered to find someone to take care of it.

Now that the lawn fairies stopped by to cut it, I'll be able to maintain it after I get my mower back . It will be nice to have people not stare in disgust at my yard as they drive past. I think my neighbor fixing my mower is the one that whacked it, but I'm not sure. There was no note, so it could have been any old vigilante yard maintenance guy with a vendetta against knee-deep grass and a heart of gold. Hopefully I'll find out soon.

Slow day...

I'm having a really slow day at work, which is why I'm killing time doing this. This is a really bad thing, because I'm in accounting and I have deadlines. The end of the month is approaching - June ends, for me, on July 5th - and I have to have everything into the system by then. However, nothing came in the mail today! Which means it will all be here tomorrow, Friday, or god forbid on Tuesday, when I have to really cram everything in. I have limited workday hours because of public transportation and school demands. If I can't get everything done, my supervisor is supposed to do it. I say "supposed to" because I have a feeling she'll suddenly have a sick day or some crisis and be unable to do anything. She's usually ill on the day following a long weekend holiday. If there's no holiday, she's just sick on Monday.

When you have a personal crisis every day, are they really crises anymore?

Here's the work situation. I've been in this job for almost 5 years. So has my supervisor. She still has not gained proficiency at her job, and it frustrates the living crap out of me. Even worse, I'm not good at hiding it. It turns out that there's an opening in another department, and I want it. I'm "interviewing" today. Wish me luck. Even worse, I have to convince her that she needs to learn my processes so that if I leave this position, she can keep the department going while my replacement gets up to speed. Instead of learning, say, how to do the wire transfers, she has decided that the process is too cumbersome and wants to change the process. It is not, in fact, cumbersome - if you understand it. She wants to shorten the process down so much that we won't be able to pay our vendors correctly or track wires in the system after we post them. In other words, she wants to do the absolute minimum and ignore things like audit trail and reporting requirements. She can do it after I quit, but while it is my process I'm going to do it correctly.

Hey, more mail came in! Gotta go.

First blog post!

If you found this blog, you may have found it because of my previous site, which I gave up because my parents found it. They're pretty intelligent, so they may find this one, too. I'm not creative enough to come up with a new name.

A bit about me... I'm a third-time college student (third time's a charm, right?) working in a full-time accounting job in downtown Seattle. I'm very average in most respects. I make the average income for King County, I have a car, a mortgage, a cat, and two fish tanks. I'm way too interested in hiking, but until I get my accounting degree I have cut down to one hike each month. When I have the time and energy, I also like to bike, skate, and snowboard. I really like to lounge around in the summer in my back yard with my grill and my barbecue and a book and a beer. I love road trips. I seriously dig my camera. I actually have a very small home business from which I sell some of my pictures. I have literally no social life because all of my time is spent either at work, at school, or trying to get away from work and/or school.

Get the picture?

So my passion is actually hiking with my camera. I've gotten some great pictures. I spent Memorial Day weekend getting horrifyingly sunburned on the Snow Lake/Gem Lake trail. This weekend I hope to get horrifyingly sunburned in Royal Basin. We shall see. Western Washington is always overcast or raining on the Fourth of July, so I won't be surprised if I'm waterlogged by the time I get back. For my birthday last year, I hiked up into the Enchantments. That was in late August. The first day was nice. The second day was nice if you like torrential downpours that are heavy enough to put out five month-old forest fires in a day. That kinda sucked, so I plan to go back in the summer of '07. This year for my birthday, I hope to hike the Necklace Valley. I have a four-day weekend, so it may work out.

And now I have to be a responsible working citizen. More later.