Ch Ch Ch Changes

It looks like the Peeved family will not be moving to Texas. Michelle & I talked about it the other day.  Peeved husband LOVES his new job and his new office and his coworkers and has been pushing to stay in CA.  They also have lots and lots of family there to help with the kiddos when necessary.  Strangely, I'm not at all sad about it. Mostly because I think this experiment in cheap, friendly, Republican living isn't really working for me.  I know the job thing is a HUGE part of the issue. If I were happier in my work I might be happier here. But there are some fundamental flaws with Texas.  Things like I HATE WIND.  They may not have written a song about the winds sweeping down Texas' plain, but it does.  I don't love 100+ degree weather. It may be a "dry" heat but it is still fucking hot and like the wilting flower I am I regularly suffer.

So what does this mean?  I don't know.  I'm going to start applying for jobs in CA and maybe a few other states. I have to finish my practicum here in TX.  (Well I don't HAVE to, but I would imagine it would be hard to change practicum mid-stream.)  I should be done with it on tax day, which is actually sooner than I originally thought.  Everything else I have to do can be done online. I can't figure out if I should just slog through the hell job for another 3 - 4 months so I can finally apply for library jobs since I'll be essentially done by May/June or find another benefits job for awhile.  If I move to CA, it will have to be another benefits job. As it is, I almost cried when I looked at the rents there. Who knows what is coming, but I'm keeping my mind open to it.

I'm easy, but don't piss me off

I'm changing car insurance companies.  This is kind of a big deal for me because in general when I sign up for a service, product or whatever I stick with them.  Short of a huge issue I'll stick with a company indefinitely.  Of course some of that is just sheer lazyness.  Once I've signed up for something I don't want to have to go through the huge project of researching information and then changing to something else.  So finally deciding to change car insurance carriers after months of spending a ridiculous amount of money took an act of extreme bad customer service to make me switch.  I called my guy several months ago and asked how to get off the high risk program.  He did some checking and thought he could and my new rate would be x - much cheaper than I was paying.  Ok great, sign me up I say.  And then nothing.  I called pack a good 6 - 8 times in the next two months with assurances that I'll get a call back.  With a "you haven't gotten the change paperwork yet?"  With nothing.  So I get a new insurance carrier and called to cancel my current policy today.  Again I get the "we're not in the office so call the 800 number" message.  Bye bye my guy.  Welcome new girl. The worst part is that I originally told them I would understand if it couldn't be done in this initial six months.  All they had to say was "Oh sorry, we can't make that change until your renewal" and I'm lazy enough to have stuck around.

Satan's Scheme

Have I mentioned there's a huge church across the freeway from my apartment building?  Huge. It is a Baptist church and I can see it from various points in my complex. It is not a megachurch as defined by some website I found about them which kind of surprises me but what do I know?  Anyway... this week on their scoreboard sign thingy they have the phrase "Satan's scheme" and each time I think is this a hairbrained activity?  Is Satan planning on hiding his new dress from Ricky because he spent all his allowance on it?  Did he go to work at a candy factory and eat all the candy?  And since Satan is my heinous ex-brother-in-law, is he actually planning on doing something heinous to my favorite nephew now that said favorite nephew lives near them? These are the things I ponder.  Clearly I have too much time on my hands.

Shopping is hard

One of the difficult things about moving from a location with a huge Asian population to one without a huge Asian population is finding asian food components I used to use regularly.  I'm not even looking for anything particularly exotic.  I was looking for sesame oil and hoisin sauce (hoisin sauce is difficult because I have to find GF hoisin sauce) and fresh ginger.  It took me 3 stores to find hoisin sauce that was GF and ginger.  Now I must remember that Kroger is really the best bet for most things I want. 

I just do what the disembodied voice in the box tells me to...

I just got back from a trip to deepest darkest Dallas.  Since I'm new to the area, and especially new to deepest darkest Dallas, I was using the GPS.  The GPS and I tend not to agree on certain things and frequently I find myself yelling at her.  (I use the female voice on the GPS because the male one sounds way too much like a Speak & Spell).  Today was no different.  In the part of Dallas where I was, apparently there's construction and it took me like 1/2 mile on two different freeways just to get back to the 183W.  I don't know why we couldn't use surface streets.  I especially couldn't figure out why we couldn't use surface streets given how bad traffic was for that 1/2 mile.  (I know I'm relatively new to driving in traffic.  Walking in Seattle for 6 years does not prepare one for bumper to bumper traffic.)  On the way home things got even weirder.  I'm driving along getting ready to get onto my freeway close to home and it tells me to take a certain exit.  Hmm... maybe it knows something I don't.  So I get off the freeway.  Then it tells me to take a right and get back on the freeway.  WTF?  I could've stayed on the freeway I was on because the exchange was coming up.  Stupid box. 

Fait Accompli!

Remember earlier in the summer when I said I wanted to clean out my storage unit?  I did it.  Go me. Go me.  Go go go me.  I cleaned out 8 boxes into 3 trash bags and 3 boxes for charity and 1 tote to go back into the storage.  Not too shabby.

My car is in the shop this week.  Luckily the person who hit me hit the part that already had a scrape so that's getting fixed by default.  Yay!

I have a 2nd date with the minotaur this weekend.  Dating.  Yay! (Well that may be a stretch.  We'll see how it goes.)

I'm going to a volunteering meet up next Saturday.  If things don't pan out with the minotaur (and I really don't think they will... I'm not that interested), maybe I'll meet a new one on Saturday... one who knows how to use tools and volunteers. :P  Yay!

My sister and her kid came to visit last weekend.  Yay!  I'm sure they'll come again.

I was almost tricked into supporting Right to Lifers

While I was running my errands this morning I drove past a car wash for life and I thought ooh! I'll get my car wash and support life. To me "life" means either lifelong aids alliance or cancer. It wasn't until I saw the t-shirt that said "pro-life" that I stopped myself. Phew. That was a close one!

Maternity Leave is almost over

On Saturday I will have been here 12 weeks. Because I work in benefits 12 weeks to me means FMLA time. :) (I know it is illogical, but go with it)

So I have been here 12 weeks and maybe it is due to the comfort of my AC and my absolutely fabulous sofa I'm sitting on, but I feel like I have no opinion on living here yet. I don't hate it, which in itself is surprising given how I hate to be hot. There are definitely things I do like about living here (palatial apartment notwithstanding). Of course part of that is just amenities I have now that I didn't have in Seattle. It is nice owning a car again. I hadn't realized how much I missed driving. Maybe not driving so much but the freedom owning a car brings.

My job... I don't know yet how I feel about it. There are aspects I like. There are aspects I want to like. I was lamenting to PeevedMichelle a couple days ago that I wonder where I would be careerwise if I had never moved to Seattle. I usually get this way when I am stressed about money. Where I am now is more than I was at the u. It took me over 5 years to get back to my LA salary in Seattle. Michelle very astutely pointed out multiple things... 1 - for almost everyone working, the grass is greener somewhere else. 2 - the extended unemployment and then working at the casino really did a number on my confidence. 3 - the university ultimately didn't help because it was so much better than the casino (but in the grand scheme of things not great either on several levels) that I just stuck around out of gratefulness. I also stuck around because certain benefits were just hard to give up. Having as much time off as I had was awesome. Ultimately this all leads me to the fact that this is not my end of the line job. I'm not sure how long I'll stay at my current place. I like it well enough, but they don't pay for most benefits, I'm iffy on how they treat employees as a whole, and there's no growth possible. Also I'll need more money if I'm adopting in a couple years.

Why Disneyland is better than Six Flags

So I'm now a Six Flags PlayPass holder. Basically I can go to any one of many Six Flags parks in the US this year if I wanted to. I get a discount for the passes from work and I knew my sister would come back and theoretically Lyday is going to come and go and given that an individual ticket is I tihnk 50ish bucks and the Play Pass is 50 bucks it worked out well.

So my sister came down and we went this weekend where I realized that Six Flags will not replace a Disney park but it might be a nice distraction sometimes. We hit all the coasters and high tension rides. I got sunsick twice. The first time we managed to cool me off by going on Roaring Rapids and getting soaked. The 2nd we were in the car on the way home. We had the AC blasting and it just didn't help. We stopped in to get dinner and I couldn't eat. I got home, turned up the AC and turned on two fans and lay down in the bedroom. I could tell the moment the heat broke because all of a sudden I was FREEZING and had to cuddle up under the blankets. Had my appetite back and FINALLY could eat. (I drank water. I drank juice. I drank vitamin water. It was just too hot for me. And there are not a lot of cooling off options.)

Anyway as I thinking about it on Sunday I realized my issue with Six Flags. There are no middle of the road rides. All the rides (as near as I can tell) are either extreme rides - roller coasters and whatnot - or baby rides. There's no middle ground. Or at least what I consider middle ground. Admittedly Disney doesn't actually have a lot of thrill rides (and definitely not by Six Flags fan standards). But it is nice to get to ride Pirates of the Caribbean or Small World as a little lull. As it was we had to take a break after every 3 or 4 rides for me because too many in a row would make me ill. Maybe I just need to accept that I am not Six Flags' target audience. :P

Ahh Texas

So while I was walking around the grocery store like a normal person does when I came along the "international" aisle. The heading on the aisle: Mexcian & Chinese. Cracked me up a lot.

My sister is here in town. It is so exciting. I like it when she visits. We're going to Six Flags today. Tomorrow we're going to Wicked. It'll be a good time (albiet expensive). :)

On A Lighter Note - I'm so not in kansas anymore.

I joined the party planning committee at work. I did this of my own volition. I thought it would be fun. Clearly I'm a moron. We're talking about doing a "shirt" day once a month when the whole site all wear shirts following a theme (sports teams, hawai'ian, etc) This month is Memorial Day so we're wearing red, white and blue. The committee sent around a flyer (flier?) for opinions before it got sent out and I commented. Holy crap. I clearly opened up a can of worms. I just found some of the phrasing to be a little potentially offensive and should we try to say it a little differently. I then pondered if perhaps honoring Memorial Day wasn't a little too political. Again, clearly I said that perhaps we should all eat babies for dinner for their tender and succulent meat. Luckily I got lectured on the history of Memorial Day so now I could not possibly be confused about potential offensiveness of Memorial Day. So I'm sharing this whole ridiculous drama with my coworker and we both came to the same agreement: not everybody is for the wars that have been fought recently and Memorial Day honors those that fall in war and MAYBE it could be offensive to some. And then she says "Yeah, we should have just nuked the shit out of them and been done with it." Funny how that works sometimes.

Burning the candle at both ends

I woke up this morning and my first thought was not WTF am I doing up at 4:45? It was "I hate the phrase meet-cute." I don't know why I hate it, but I really do.

Despite going to bed last night at midnight I purposefully woke up this morning at 5 to capitalize on my morningpersonness. I finished some pots in the kitchen and boxed them up. I've realized I'm at that space where I just want shit in boxes and I don't care if things get broken in the move. I should care. I'm not independently wealthy.

My eyeballs are like sand. They burn the flesh. I've been rubbing them like a toddler an hour past her naptime. I think it is allergies.

I finally found my netflix dvd that I've had out since...November. That's right... november. I could have bought this DVD 4 times over with that. I'm going to watch it at lunch time today and then suspend my account for 1 month and mail it back. (Awesome. Holding the acct on netflix is totally easy!)

Today I'm going to pack up my office. This will allow me to just have a box already ready and sealed so I don't have to repack this stuff when I get home.

Holy crap, if I find any more arts & crap supplies or girl scout stuff while moving my head may explode. Just fair warning.

My White Whale

So in the course of packing I've discovered the room I thought was going to be the easiest, my bedroom, is turning out to be the biggest pain in the ass. First of all there's no space. I have to put the boxes on my bed because there's no room at the foot of it for boxes. Apparently I've also taken to just dumping stuff in the bedroom. It's the first room as I walk in the door and about 99% of the time I walk in and immediately have to pee. It doesn't matter if I'm coming home from work, from dinner, from an evening out, the movies... whatever. 99% of the time I walk in the door, throw off my coat, backpack and anything I'm carrying on the bed and then go to the bathroom. My bedroom has become sort of a catch all for everything... old mail, dry goods, bathroom stuff, etc. It is ridiculous.

I have to begin making lists. I'm not a list person naturally, but there's a lot of shit that has to be dealt with for my move... like my cable box... if I sign up for comcast in Dallas can I just bring this one? Do I have to return it to them... and on and on and on. I don't think I have time for this.

Tonight's my last scout meeting. I have mixed emotions on this. On the one hand, of course I'm sad. I love these girls. I've been with many of them for YEARS. I will miss them terribly. On the other... I'm tired. I've been burnt out for the past few years and I know the troop has suffered as a result. I will consider doing it again after Michelle & Bryan move with K & O. If Michelle is interested in having the girls in scouts I'll consider doing it again... or not. :)