Well, really just a weekend update, no celebrities included. Although that does bring up the point that I miss having Jimmy and Tina do WU on SNL. But that's neither here nor there.
I'm writing on Rachel's lappy at the moment, because I'm in her dorm room, helping her clean up bits of her room (although at the moment, she's cleaning, and I'm blogging...) and then we're gonna lay out on the futon and watch silly web videos and fall asleep. She's had a rough weekend with her RA stuff, and since she couldn't leave the building, and finally managed to get some sleep today instead of going out for dinner, I brought her some skyline goodness and am doing my best to help her feel better about life. I dunno if I'm succeeding with the latter, but the former certainly helped.
Anyway... I feel very tossed-about right now. The past few weeks at work have been so slam-bang busy, not to the point of being insane, but just to the brink of annoyance, and it always seems to work out that I don't get very much overtime in weeks like that, just a couple hours, usually. I wish that I could at least have some weekend hours to bulk up my paycheck during times like this. Speaking of work, my year anniversary is coming up on May 14 (just a day after I turn 24!) and I'm planning on asking Jim and Amy for a raise, since I think I've done a lot of great work for the company, and I'd like some incentive to stay for another year. With Trista gone, the "production department" is basically Jim and myself. Other folks get called in when needed, but that's about it at the moment. Rob Moyer is now a full-time freelancer in the shop, which just means we guarantee him 40 hours a week. It's FANTASTIC to have somebody in the shop on a regular basis. I've already managed to catch up on paperwork and start getting things in order, and Rob has gotten a jump start on fixture maintenance, which is SUPER because I've been trying to get to that for a long time now.
It's sorta weird being as small a company as we are, especially right now with not very much work going on. I'm trying to stay busy, and get the shop back to the 110% that I like it to be, instead of the 90%-ish it seems to have fallen back to in the way we've been so busy. This coming week is pretty empty, so I'm hoping to wrap up fixture maintenance, and do some moving around/maintenance of the shop. Abe and I have some ideas about how to move some things around and improve the organization of the shop. A couple of those things might even get me some more floor space to boot, which is always at a premium in our tiny little shop. It's tiny, and often crowded, but it feels like home after a year there. I get offers from other companies (both in and out of town) pretty often, and I've been turning them down because I like my job and the people I'm with. I'm hoping that Jim comes through with a raise for me, especially with us running on such low staff these days, because if it seems like I won't be getting a raise, I'll be more tempted to look into other companies and what they have to offer. It's weird to think about working anywhere else but OLLS, though. They're almost like family to me.
Anyway... what I orginally meant to write about here is Rachel. There was some weird stuff that went on with her RA job, having to do with being forced to write up a friend for doing something stupid. Now, the friend was a moron for doing what she did, and Rachel's boss was an asshole for forcing her to write up the incident report, and neither of those things are Rachel's fault, but she was still so upset about it. I dunno... I'm kinda rambling about it, but it was just strange to hear her so upset over something so out of her control. She just cares about her friends a lot, and I don't blame her. I just wish I could prevent stuff like that from upsetting her so much.
So... not a whole lot else to write about. It's pretty much been work-eat-sleep for the past few weeks, with a smattering of Rachel and Yoko mixed in. Yoko's hair clumps have gotten really bad, and I think we need to go get her professionally groomed (aka have the clumps shaved off) or else she's just gonna end up as one huge matted mess.
Also, I miss Spot. I cry every time I look out my back window at her little grave, right next to Bonk's. I threw away her cage. I didn't want to look at it, or store it, or use it for another gerbil. I dunno if I'll get another or not... it's too hard to fall in love with such a sweet animal and loose them after only a few years. I'm close to tears right now just thinking about those two, so I don't wanna talk about them anymore. Anyway, I know Spot is up in gerbil heaven with Bonk, and they're happy together again. I just wish they were still happy and here with me.
