As recently seen on Cel’s Blog, I am also doing a pictures meme.
Now that I’m home, I thought I’d try this again. Here’s how it works: You request one or more pictures of things/places/sights here at home–people do not count. I take the pictures and post them. Sound fair? Alright, let’s go!
Or should I say work is crazy? Perhaps both are correct.
I had Friday off, but I worked Thursday afternoon, and had plenty to do then. I got there at 3:30, and it wasn’t too busy, but Chris mentioned that it had been all day. I started to count half cases of pop so I knew how many to get from the back room, and then got sidetracked on a courtesy call or three. I went to the back room, and discovered that Dan had just finished counting the pop as well. I’d started first, and we needed quite a bit, so we both worked on it for a while, and then he took off to catch another courtesy call. I took the cart out to the floor, and was filling the second of three displays when I got stuck on another round of courtesy calls, and then Troy, the manager, called over the intercom “Wet cleanup to the end of seven immediately.” It turns out, someone had bumped a display, and four 24-pack longnecks of Budweiser broke all over the floor. Dan did a major part in the cleanup, but I helped quite a bit, too, and helped Bobbie restack the corner of the charcoal display that had also been knocked over. By the time that was cleaned up, I hav been on for over an hour and a half.
I returned to the cart of pop, and finished all three displays, and then went on to the shelf, where the rest of the pop on the cart went. As I rounded the corner to the aisle, I realized that Chris had also decided to do pop, and had filled another cart and was working the pop. So I helped him unload his cart, and pulled a few things off the bottom of my cart that he hadn’t gotten, and then went to the back to unload my cart.
The day got better after that, and I was only on until 8:30, but the first two hours were one of the more tiring I have had in quite a while. At least I wasn’t searching the store for something to do.
And on the topic of work, the way the schedule worked out, I work the last four days of this schedule week, and the first five days of next week, so Saturday is my first of nine days in a row. To be fair, three or four of them are shorter, 5 hour days, but I will still be at work each day. I’ll be glad when I get to the next set of days off.
I’ve been spending a bit of time the last few days working on converting my blog over to WordPress, which I’ ve seen several other people using recently. For the first time, I have a server where I can install my own PHP files, finally making this possible. I also learned enough about Apache rewrites so that all the old links to my Blogger blog still work, and will show you the same page that you would have seen. The template should continue to change over the next few days, because most of the ones out there wind up with the sidebar way under the rest of the blog. The one I have now’s okay, but it’s not my favorite, and the sidebar looks strange..
I got all my old Blogger posts imported over here to WordPress, and now I’m looking for a theme that I like. I found several that look nice, but so far, all but the one I am currently using have had problems with formatting, placing the sidebar below the body of the page. The strange thing is that the default template didn’t do this for a while, but then it just started to do it. Oh well, I didn’t expect this to be painless.
I didn’t sleep very well last night, so I was tired, and ended up taking a four hour nap this afternoon. Now, I’m not tired, so I’m still up.
I said that I wasn’t going to blog about work, but some things just beg to be written about. Take Saturday, for example.
I was checking, and a couple came thhrough my line and bought $7.62 in groceries. I thought that they were speaking a foreign language, but wasn’t sure until it came time to pay, when the had a rapid-fire exchange in what sounded like German. She began pulling out money (it was US currency) and got the seven okay. She seemed to be having a bit of trouble with the coins, though. There was more discussion, and she began gesturing at a machine on the till that allows you to purchase lotto tickets with your groceries. More discussion, and then she asked me what the prize was. A bit surprised, I told her what the jackpots for the two main lotteries we sell were, and then it was her turn to be confused. She said “No, the price! What’s the price?”
I relized my mistake, and repeated that it was $7.62. She again tried counting out the coins, taking a minute to look on both sides of a nickel to see what it was worth. She had the proper change, but didn’t seem to have the value of the nickel correct, and tried to give me 32¢, but in the end, she let me pick out the appropriate coins and went on her way, studying her receipt the whole way to the door. A bit frustrating, honestly. Now I see why people from some countries get annoyed when Americans make no effort to learn the language/culture. She obviously had made quite an effort, and even that was annoying.
The high school play is coming up next weekend, on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday nights. My sister is in the play, and is starting to panic a bit, but she’s always been the really organized type. They’re performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It should be a good production. I’ll have to change my schedule a bit at work, as the only night that I can see it is the last night, and I only get off in enough time to be there about 25 minutes before the show, and I expect it to be standing room only by that time.
I’m still not tired, but in the interest of getting my sleep schedule back in synch, I’m going to head off to bed now.
–Nathan
A bit of time away from the computer has done me good. Even though I only made it about 2-3 days before I actually got back online for e-mail purposes, I haven’t been doing all that much on. I’ve resumed reading all the blogs I used to, by RSS, and still need to leave a few comments that I’ve been putting off for a while now.
Been working more or less full time, but shifts like 11-8 don’t leave a lot of time for stuff in the morning, and by the time I get home, I’m not terribly ambitous either. Actually, I should probably sign off from my return so I can get up in the morning, and be to work at 10.
For those who didn’t listen, the last post was an audio post win which I expressed my frustration with computers in genreal, and planned to quit using them at all for the next few weeks. I didn’t make good on that promise, but this summer will feature much less computer use than the last month, and the last year.
Okay, enough babbling, off to bed.
I’m just a bit annoyed right now. Last night, I downloaded the new version of Gaim, my IM client, and decided to install it. I logged off, and installed it, and now it refuses to log me in at all. Now to see if a restart will fix things.
[EDIT: Restarting failed to fix the problem, as did uninstalling and re-installing the new version. I’m now using the old version again, and will probably just wait until the next version comes out. At least I didn’t lose any settings.]
A shot of the sky, as seen from my back yard last June.
I feel like I ought to do a quick post, if not just to let everyone know that I’m still alive. I’ve been busy the last few days, working at the store, and doing two days’ work for Ray, the man from church that I mentioned earlier. He paid me for the work, which turned out to be mainly moving LOTS of wood chips from a pile in his driveway, and spreading them in his flowerbeds and yard. It’s not that hard, physically, but doing it for 5 hours makes you tired. (He starts at about 5 in the morning, so by the time I got there both days, there was only about 5 hours left in his workday.)
Not a whole lot else going on. Tomorrow at church is the “Never On Mother’s Day Mother’s Day Breakfast”, a longstanding tradition. This year they have recruited the high-school age kids from the church to work as servers, while some of the men do the cooking. I’ve been asked to help with the serving, so that happens tomorrow.
I’ve been slowly cleaning my room, I expect that I should have most of my stuff unpacked by the time I go back to UP. 🙂 Honestly, I don’t know where to put part of the stuff, but I’ve been going through all my old high school stuff and tossing some of it. The trick is to sort through it long enough after you did it that you don’t remember what it was, and soon enough that you can still throw it away and not feel like it is some sort of antique, or keepsake. I have two boxes of papers under my bed full of that sort of thing, and all sorts of papers from high school. I know I’m probably never going to use them for anything, but I want to keep them anyway. Oh well, sooner or later, I’ll probably just decide to throw it all out.
I suspect that this summer, I will be posting less, unless things happen. At this rate, there won’ t be much news this summer, which means not much to write about. So until next time, whenever that is.
–Nathan