fuck lent.

I know I swore off booze for lent, but I'm not catholic anyway. and I really NEED a drink. or six.

work is beginning to crush my morale. we've got year end looming friday, and a bunch of jobs I need to get out before that so they show up on the books for 2005. I've had guys working 12 hour days all week and we're still not close. engineering problems, parts not being ordered, not starting on the projects soon enough... it's all compounded.

and then I had the shop renovation dropped in my lap. we're acquiring a small competitor and taking on their product line. which means I need to add about 50% of my shop's space without adding any shop. I have two weeks to reorganize the entire shop floor and coordinate having about 500 sq feet of mezzanine installed...

the pressure is getting to me. my boss gave me my raise early, but he also tacked a lot more onto my job description by doing so. he's given me more authority over the shop and placed higher expectations on me. all of this added together is really freaking me out.

I've had a mickey of southern comfort in the cupboard for an emergency. I'm going to drink it and go to bed about 6pm tonight, and not wake up for 12 hours...

I feel so.... dirty.

for the first time in over a decade, I will be buying a PC tomorrow. I've have been a tried and true apple enthusiast, through thick and thin, using solely macintosh puters at home since '95.

but a coworker of mind mentioned how he was getting a new puter, and was going to "trash" his old one... I told him I'd take it, he said he'd sell it to me for a hundred bucks. I've just ordered a copy of windoze xp online, and will likely need to pick up a keyboard for it, which puts my "new" puter at around $300. that's a thousand dollars savings over that tasty new intel imac I had my eye on, but I'll likely get that sooner or later anyway... I just couldn't pass this one up. it's hardly a throwaway type piece, my coworker just has no sense of value for things... he LITERALLY burns money for entertainment. I've watched him set fire to dollar bills. it's a 3200+ 2.2Ghz AMD processor, 1 gig of RAM, 100+ gig HD (he's not sure which he'll put in yet), ATI graphics card with 512mb memory, liquid cooled... basically, it's a lot of damn computer for $100. it's about twenty times faster than the old powerbook I've been using...

now I just gotta wait for SPORE to be released... woot.

dammit.

one of my worst character traits is how I deal with self-inflicted adversity. other people throw shit my way, I can usually sift through it pretty quickly. but when I fuck up, it bothers me. I'm a perfectionist and I take pride in my work. and normally I don't have problems. it's when I take on extra work or try to do too much that I get sloppy.

like this week. our shipper has been gone all week. and the backup shipper is gone today as well. I'm the backup to the backup. problem is, I don't know what I'm doing, except on the UPS shipments. I've had maybe fifteen minutes of training on every other type of shipping combined, and that was four months ago.

yesterday I forgot to consolidate a shipment. to new zealand. the big part went, the little part didn't. so today I had to ship the little part. I couldn't ship it collect like the first shipment, because it wouldn't be fair to the customer. they already paid about $700 in shipping charges (the shipment from today would have only added a few dollars). so we have to eat the charges today. $500, prepaid. $500 in lost profit, easily wiping out the entire order.

sure, everyone makes mistakes. and trust me, there have been FAR more costly mistakes here. but never by me. a $500 torpedo in the company's profits is not something I take lightly. and as a result, I'll likely be sulking about this for weeks. pennance for an otherwise petty negligence, yet I can't force myself to see it that way. it's one giant fuckup that I'll have hanging around my neck for a long time...

dammit.

I think I did something REALLY stupid.

my student loan was being repaid at about 7.5% interest. after four years of on time payments, it was to drop two percent. I got my statement for the payment that was supposed to have the drop, and it didn't. so I called, and they explained that it would show up on the next billing cycle. so I set the statement down and forgot about it.

I was wondering why we had so much extra money this month, but attributed it to the dual income goodness, so we went shopping. problem is, I didn't put the student loan statement with the rest of the bills, so it didn't get paid.

miyuki found it yesterday. problem is, it was due four days ago. I made a payment online immediately, but by the time it goes through monday, it will be six days delinquent.

"you will receive this reduced rate benefit for the remaining term of your eligible loan as long as you continue to make on-time payments."

fuck. now I have to wonder what they define "on-time" as. some creditors consider 30 days late to be "late"... some, it's late one minute after midnight the day it's due. I can't call them until monday to find out.

this is really gonna suck tho. 2% APR on $35k is a LOT of damn money. I guess the only upside to having to pay the damn thing off an extra few years is it does equate to a bigger tax deduction, but that's not much consolation.

in other news, we did finally get around to seeing tristram shandy. we laughed our asses off the entire time. I imagine it would have been even better had we actually read the book, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. definitely a dvd to buy when it's released.

we're going to see V for vendetta today... not sure what to expect. lots of 'splosions and a shaved natalie portman. anything beyond that will be bonus.

next weekend we'll sign up the gym. kinda couldn't do that this weekend because of the $300 loan payment I forgot about. one last week of freedom to slob about, anyway...

I also got a haircut. it sucks. I asked for it short on top and back, longer on top. she took an inch off of everywhere. it's too long around the ears and back, and shorter than I wanted on top. this is why I just go months at a time and then shave it. I have NEVER had a haircut worth a damn.

fuck communal laundry.

I'm really looking forward to having my own place with my own washer and dryer. I can't go a month without having some sort of laundry issue.

we have three washers and dryers. for 38 apartments. it can be annoying at times. I've learned to do ours in the afternoon right after I get home from work, or early mornings on weekends.

I was trying to do two loads tonight, but someone beat me to it. there was only one washer free. so I did my first load, and then swapped in another once the first was in the dryer. it takes longer, but oh well.

I went down to switch them again and pick up the first load. it was still wet. I closed the door and hit start. it started up again without any money.

some asshole opened the door to the dryer halfway through the cycle. and then didn't bother to press start to restart it. the fact that the dryer makes noise, gives off heat, vibrates audibly AND HAS A BIG FUCKING LIGHT ON IT tells me this person did so intentionally. you can accidentally open a washer without realising there are clothes in it. you can do the same with a dryer that isn't being used. but halfway through the cycle?

there is no fucking excuse for that. I'm half tempted to sit in the damn laundry room for an hour, wait for the fucker who was using the other two units to come down, and cockpunch him. I want his fucking testicles to explode. I know it's a guy too, 'cos I saw him loading up his laundry. I was even concerned he was going to be an ass and try to steal my dryer (since he had filled both of his and had two washers going at the same time), so I sat there and waited for mine to come up.

and there's nothing I can do about this. complain to the manager? that'd be a fucking joke. she couldn't do anything even if she wanted to. she's proven to be wholly ineffective at enforcing any of the rules here...

sigh.

haven't updated this is forever. hasn't been much to write about.

I bought a bunch of new clothes last weekend. most of it was on sale for ridiculously cheap. I like shopping when I can do that. cheap shoes, cheap shirts, all sorts of fun crap.

and despite vowing to never do it again, I may be organising a softball team again. we've got eight or nine people at work interested, so I figured I'd look into it. work will pay for half of the $800+ entry fee, we'll be on the hook for the rest. it's gonna be a pain to collect the money and organise practices and all that...

yeah, not much else going on. we're boring and lame.

"gym? what's a gym?"

that's only funny if you immediately think of homer simpson....

now that we have some dispoable income, we're looking at being proactive with our lives... you know, since we're eating out a LOT more, maybe we should do something about it? so we're looking at gyms. there's one across the street, looks really nice. problem is, it'd be $75 a month EACH if we went month to month. only drops to $60 a month if we pay for a year in advance.

there's another a few blocks away, costs $35 a month each, but has no pool. I like swimming. there's also a curves about eight blocks away, good for miyuki, boys not allowed. but there's a public pool in ballard! $45 a month for access to the morning lap swim.

this sucks. we're either going to stay fat (or get fatter: the american way!), or we're going to shovel a ton of money at some gym or another, and then pray we actually use the damn thing...