hello friends

Working up a spares post for generation 3, and Duncan and Dominic are making me laugh with their choice of leisure-time activities.

Also, dammit. I should probably figure out tomorrow why like a third of the pictures in that old entry are now broken, when they were all uploaded to the same photobucket account.

Toby's method of eating is to hold the bowl a foot from her face and scream at it until the food leaps into her mouth in terror.

Either that or her right arm is just glitched in cellphone-dialing position. Your choice!

But I do know that Colleen looks very sad to not be allowed to find joy in anything, but rather to feel only fear at the idea that someone might smash the urn of her freshly-deceased father.

For the Sims 2 nerds in the audience: the only reason she has an extra want slot is because I tried giving her one with the Insimenator in the hopes that that would jar her empty slots into rerolling. All it did was make them show up black and locked.

At least she seems to have fixed herself a few sim-hours later.

This has nothing to do with the Merrick legacy, for the record. I was just hopped into an old, unrelated-to-anything house to test out some new downloads.

I totally, totally have a job!

"Now, hold on there, Jenny," I hear you say, because I have your room bugged. "Of course you have a job. You're working at Epic, writing electronic medical record software in a t-shirt and Birkenstocks. You've been there since 2008! It says so right at the top of your LJ!"

And I say, well... not so much these days. We parted ways on the last day of last month. And I didn't do much in the way of looking for another job while I was still employed, because I am classy and by Cthulhu if they were paying me to do work then I was gonna do work. Which meant that I began the first day of my unemployment with only vague prospects.

Friday the 31st was my last day at Epic. The following Monday morning, I got a call from a staffing agency wanting to talk about a couple of jobs. That afternoon I had a phone interview with the manager for one of said jobs, and before the call was over, he declared that he had heard enough and that as far as he was concerned we could skip the in-person interview and just go straight to my working temp-to-hire. I wasn't sure I wanted to commit like that just off the bat, but the staffing agency guy set me up with a "working interview" for the next Monday, the 10th. I went in for about six hours, got a look at the place, got a look at the work I'd be doing, and... wound up deciding that I liked what I saw and wanted to keep coming in.

So I spent exactly one week unemployed!

If I were not still just a temp/technically an employee of the staffing agency, then I would be a web developer at CUNA Inc (the national trade association for credit unions). And I super like it so far! Like, here's the rundown.

NEGATIVES, JUST TO GET THEM OUT OF THE WAY:
1. I had to ditch the t-shirts and Birkenstocks for polo shirts and my super-fancy shoes that I need to switch for new, slightly less fancy ones since these ones were like $185 and that is definitely not everyday-shoe money. (At one point I would never have dreamed of paying that much for even fancy shoes, but I've permanently bumped up the dollar amount that I consider to be reasonable, because it's worth paying Walking Company prices to not suffer from plantar fasciitis anymore.)
2. The cafeteria is only partially subsidized, so no more $2.50 lunches (or $1 if I just made a PB&J).
3. Cubicle instead of a shared office.
4. Moving from Epic to the real world is pretty much always a pay cut.
5. I miss my Epic pals. :(
6. I now drive with the sun in my eyes going to/from work, instead of driving with the sun at my back going out to Epic.
7. I... kind of hate having to get up at 6:40 in order to be at work by 8.
8. No health insurance while I'm a temp, unless I either pay for COBRA or go with one of the not-that-great staffing agency options.

POSITIVES, AT LEAST THE ONES THAT I CAN ACTUALLY SUM UP IN WORDS AND NOT JUST FEELS:
1. Everyone is so ridiculously nice that it kind of scares me a little.
2. It is crazy refreshing to be working with HTML and CSS and Visual Studio instead of M and the ancient crappy version of Visual Basic that crashes if you look at it funny! Also I can see the results of my work in production without waiting a couple years and maybe seeing somebody use it while I'm out on site somewhere!
3. The break room is AMAZING. It is better than Epic break rooms. You literally have to swipe your security badge to get in. THAT IS HOW GOOD IT IS.
4. Actually it's just that there's a lot of security so you have to card into everything, including the cafeteria. Which amuses me, making it a positive. I have to card twice and enter a PIN to get from the parking lot to my desk!
5. The campus is no Epic, but it's very pretty to walk around. They also apparently remodel/keep up the buildings very well; even up in the IT section, away from where visitors might go, it is way less of a crappy cubicle farm than you might expect. (Also I think I have the biggest cube in the block, because mine has to go around a column.)
6. Did I mention everyone is super nice? My boss keeps checking back to make sure I'm getting a chance to take my lunch break. This actually does deserve to be its own second point because I am SUPER STOKED to have a boss who doesn't intimidate the hell out of me like my last TL at Epic did.
7. The perm position has twice as much sick time as Epic did. I always wished Epic would give us a little less vacation and a little more sick time, because one good cold could run through half your year's supply. You technically *could* take vacation in lieu of sick time, but let's be honest, non-standard things are generally that way because they're things that people would really rather you not do.
8. The perm position is unionized you guys. I love unions! I've marched in support of unions! Well, ambled in support, anyway. It wasn't really a march.
9. It's really close to a couple of the places that my Epic pal group likes to eat lunch at sometimes, meaning I could potentially join them.


And pretty much all of the negatives are guarantees for any new job except 6 and 8, and maybe 1 or 7. Most places don't even have an on-site cafeteria, meaning you have to eat at Chipotle or whatever every workday for the rest of your life.

POSITIVES WIN.

You know, I honestly never expected I'd be a web developer. I figured you had to be super-expert in Javascript and Flash and Silverlight and whatever else the kids are using these days. But apparently it's sometimes enough to just know a moderate amount each of a half-dozen different things!

(Totally not getting around to updating that top-of-the-LJ post yet, for the record. You're lucky I got to this within a week and a half.)

I've been meaning to get to this post, about which nobody will probably ever care except for me, for like six months.

Go go holiday weekend action!



Note: this is the spares update for, and should be read after, generation 2.


General warning: sometimes I swear.

The heir for generation 2 was Ruthie, the spouse was jerkface Derek, and the mainline kids were Cassandra; triplets Jeremy, Michael, and Duncan; and triplets Tiffany, Crystal, and Knute. This is the spares update, with Ruthie's siblings and their offspring. Most of it was written as I was playing, some months ago.

( Long entry is long. )

Next time: I don't know! Maybe the generation 3 spare update, which is also pretty ridiculously long.

The comb I have been using since 1996, and which combed my hair better than any other comb ever, just broke. Snapped right in two.

I'm sad now.

Me: [wearing my Don't Hate The Deadite, Hate The Necronomicon shirt]
Guy serving coffee at work coffee cart: "Have you seen the trailer for the new Evil Dead?"
Me: . o O ( You are my new best friend for the day. )

I hang out with almost 100% non-horror-liking people at work, so someone recognizing my doofy referency shirt and starting a conversation about its referenced topic, when I'm anywhere but a horror con, is pretty much teh best.

Someday -- some far-off day -- I am convinced that I will finally see the end of people cracking five straight minutes of fat jokes when I am RIGHT FUCKING THERE AT THE TABLE. It's like "ha ha, you're right! Bill Clinton SHOULD be invited to all parties since that way 'the fatties' WOULD finally get some attention! They'll certainly never get any otherwise, for obvious reasons! Ha ha ha ha ha die in a fire."

This magical day will be about a week after I first win the lottery and then get a pet unicorn.

Aside from that, though, the weekly Scion game was p fun tonight.

I'm at karaoke! With people! And I had a whole beer PLUS a cocktail! I am livin CRAZY, yo.

Not singing myself, tho, I'm not THAT crazy.

(edit: yay, it was the subject field)

I'm really sure what part of this DOESN'T say "no soliciting".


But judging from those footprints, the snow that has not been shoveled from our front walk one single time this winter is not sufficient deterrent. At least, not to the Jehovah's Witnesses, and whoever it was who came to the door the other day but didn't leave anything.

Technically our neighborhood covenant bans No Soliciting signs, but we find ourselves not entirely in a mind to obey that bit. If the HOA doesn't like it then they can take it up with the Supreme Court who said decades ago that that is the only correct way for a homeowner to keep door-to-door peoples off their lawn. Or put general "no soliciting around these parts" signs up for us! That works too.

This house is my private domain, and you have no idea what I'm doing when you ring the bell or knock on the door -- I could be sitting down to a nice meal, I could be in the shower, I could be sleeping during the day because I work nights. But no matter what I'm doing, even if I am literally just sitting there staring at a wall, you still have no fucking business interrupting me. I'm especially talking to you, Jehovah's Witness person who rang TWICE and LEANED ON THE BELL the second time.

Sadface.