Corner of Bourbon & Division

My flakedom today knows no bounds.

I forgot that I was not supposed to go to work this morning, but rather that I have two days' worth of St. John's Ambulance CPR & First Aid training, courtesy of my employers.

Luckily the training is actually scheduled much later than my actual work shift, so I was able to correct course with lots of time to spare. It also meant I wasn't home at 15:00 the way I'd told ashforestwalker, and while I tried to communicate this to him via my answering machine, I'm not sure the message got through. More on that later.

Let me tell you, some of those baby-shaped mannequins are scary, especially the one which had its eyes open. ADD!Supervisor and one of the newbies was also there with me, and we spent a good portion of the class giggling in a most unseemly manner. The three of us are all pretty well-versed in CPR and first aid, and so much of the course was repetition and not super interesting. It was fun: I bonded with the newbie, and overall learned some new things and refreshed my memory of the rest. The instructional videos were pretty funny, though, complete with really ominous music, very heavy on the cello, and lots of sharp notes.

I could have done without the headache that's been plaguing me since yesterday, but it's fading now, which is nice.

ashforestwalker came in today to continue painting, and I must say that the front entrance and living room are gorgeous. ashforestwalker has a real talent for doing fantastic edging, among other things, which really gives a polished, finished look to the painting job. The green I picked is particularly vibrant. So much so that it kind of makes the yellow look a bit faded, but overall it's a nice effect. It's given a lot of life to the front rooms. I may have to hang a picture or two on the left-hand wall, because it's quite large, and with no windows or doors it's like a GIANT WALL OF GREEN FOREVER. It needs something to break it up a little bit.

So, yes. Today has been a very good day. I am looking forward to having the rest of the apartment painted, especially the kitchen.

Speaking of good news and being a flake, while I was tidying up my living room and moving piles of books downstairs so that ashforestwalker could come and paint, I found the DVDs I thought I had lost the other day. The other DVD that I would eventually have realized I was missing was Donnie Darko, but it turns out they were there all the while, cunningly disguised as a pile of books. :P

There was much rejoicing, however, as I was very put out at having lost them.

Dear flist,

Many of us are in the habit of lending each other books, CDs and DVDs. I lend out and borrow many. As a result of shoddy bookkeeping (no pun intended), I have lost track of where all these things belong in the universe.

I therefore have two requests.

1- If you currently have a book, CD or DVD of mine (or more than one), please let me know.

2- If I currently have a book, CD, or DVD of yours (or more than one), please let me know as well.

I have made up two Excel spreadsheets at work (it's night shift and I have not much else to do), which with any luck will help me keep tabs on such things in the future.

Thanks for your help!

I'm home early-ish tonight, and as a result there will be early bedtime for Phnee. Yes. Early early bed. I may watch a DVD first, but the odds are good that, just as I did yesterday, I'll be nodding off in front of the tv anyway and just give up and go to sleep.

Work is no longer absolutely fucking insane. It's just insane. The backlog created by SWMNBN is slowly but surely diminishing, and I am on top of all the work that's come our way since I've started there. The good news is that, because I have a pretty good memory for this sort of thing, I'm able to keep track of my own work. The bad news is that, if it's someone else's work, then I have no idea what people are talking about when they ask me about it.

SWMNBN, may her soul be devoured by the Great Old Ones when the stars are right, did everything half-assed. There are incomplete payment records, files that make no sense, client files that haven't been updated properly, and it's basically a giant mess. It's less of a giant mess now, but I'll be cleaning up for a very long time to come, believe you me. I am displeased.

However, Office!Boss has not freaked out once about my work in the past two days. Up until Thursday, there were serious fireworks because I was constantly in a position where I'd have to say: "I'm sorry [Office!Boss], I just don't know. I'll have to get back to you." For two days now, I have been completely on the ball, and I am pleased as punch.

To say that Office!Boss is pleased would be a freaking understatement. Yesterday, he bought me a Tim Horton's coffee. Large double double, just the way I like it. ashforestwalker tells me that this is Significant™. Apparently it's Office!Boss' secret code for "Welcome aboard, I now consider you officially part of our team." I am very very pleased about this. I'm extraordinarily glad that after less than two weeks on my own I have proved my worth as an asset to the company.

I also cleaned out our message box today. We get our faxes and voicemail at the same number, and there were about twenty faxes sitting in there, taking up valuable message box space. The advantage is that you can check your faxes on an internet site and then save them as a file on your computer. Saves paper and having metric assloads of paper files all over the place. So today I went through all the faxes, saved them all in the right places, and deleted them from the mailbox.

Monday's project is doing ALL my client follow-ups. Now that I'm getting pretty comfortable with the whole work and quote scheduling system, I'm a lot less stressed about calling up clients. Before I was always super super stressed about the phone calls because I was afraid I was doing it all back-asswards, but I've taken so many new leads (that's what we call new jobs that get called in) in the past two weeks or so that it's pretty much a breeze now. I'm still making the occasional mistake, for instance I double-booked someone by accident yesterday, but I caught it today in plenty of time and left the customer a message to call me back to reschedule. No biggie.

So Monday and very like Tuesday and maybe even Wednesday will be devoted to client follow-ups. There are a LOT of clients to call. This isn't even all SWMNBN's fault: we get tons and tons and tons of new online requests every day, so they pile up quickly. My quote schedule (appointments that I give out so that someone will go and do a free estimate for the client) is filling up almost faster than I can keep up with. This is both good and bad, obviously. We're probably going to lose a fair number of clients because we just don't have the time to do their renovations right now, and they won't be willing to wait for what's now likely over a month before they get their work done.

I also have a metric assload of estimates to type up and send out. I may ask my father if I can borrow the car on Monday and A) go into work early, and B) leave work late, so that I can just get all my stuff typed up that needs typing. The problem with my "regular" working hours is that I have next to NO time whatsoever to type up quotes and new leads and what have you. So that always gets pushed back, and that's bad. So if the car is available and not broken (it was having problems, last I heard), I will ask to take it into work that one day. One more really long day might get rid of the Giant Pile Of Things To Be Typed. All I need is two or three hours of uninterrupted time to work. If it's more than two hours I will be very surprised, but I'm willing to give myself some wriggle room here.

Maybe in a few months I'll invest in some sort of inexpensive desktop computer (a PC) so that I can take some basic typing work home with me. That way I won't be stuck at the office until all hours and can just f*ck off at 4pm the way I'm supposed to.

Okay. Going to go veg in front of my DVD player for a while, then collapse and go to sleep.

On an unrelated note: Apocalyptica's version of "The Unforgiven" could very well be mistaken for a piece by Ennio Morricone in places. I am absurdly pleased by this. I think I'll be listening to that when I next write "Beyond the Pale."

New icon!


I've been on a movie-watching kick lately. I went to see "V for Vendetta" last Thursday with F, whom I can't quite call a girlfriend yet, but it was definitely a date. F will not get mentioned too often in here, as she is a very private person and I don't think she'd like it very much if I broadcast a whole bunch of details about her over the internet. At least, not in a public post.

( Lots of rambling on about 'V for Vendetta.' )

Otherwise, I haven't been to the cinema much lately. I think I mentioned seeing "Take the Lead," which was cute if uninspired and unrealistic. What I have been doing, though, is renting movies. I rented "The Shipping News," which I think I would have enjoyed more if at least one of the characters had been sympathetic to me. Seriously, it's rare that I won't be able to empathise with any character at all in a book or movie, but in this case none of the characters were likeable in the slightest. Bleh.

I finally got around to watching "The Silence of the Lambs," only about twelve years after it came out. :P I think the movie has suffered from the lapse of time. Not because it's not a good movie, but because now most of us are quite familiar with the stereotype of the brilliant and compelling sociopath, whereas audiences at the time the movie came out were not. Now the whole "I ate his liver with a side of fava beans and a nice chianti" is pretty clichéd, even though this is the movie that started the cliché. I had the same problem when I finally saw "The Godfather." It was difficult not to laugh when Marlon Brando started talking about favours and offers people couldn't refuse, and yet this was the film that started it all. So I ended up feeling a little dissatisfied with "The Silence of the Lambs" because I expected more from it: I wanted a deeper exploration of Lecter's relationship to Clarice, especially, why he becomes obsessed with her, why he wants to help her, why she becomes obsessed with him. I wanted motivation, dammit, and I got very little. I ought to read the book: I'm sure I'll find what I'm missing in there.

On a more light-hearted, silly note, I've also been renting action films. I rented "The Fantastic Four," and enjoyed it, without attempting in the slightest to make any kind of critical judgment. This isn't the kind of movie that stands up well to scrutiny, so I left well enough alone. It's too bad Jessica Alba couldn't act her way out of a wet paper bag, because her role needed more than she could give it.

Twenty years later, I finally watched "The Terminator," and found that it doesn't do too badly after all this time. The clothes and hairstyles are painfully eighties, and some of the special effects are a little off by today's standards, but the story is compelling nonetheless. I'm currently watching "Terminator 2," but haven't finished it (I was really tired and fell asleep), and while the effects are better in this movie, I'm not sure I like the "bad guy" in this version. While I had no trouble believing the larger-than-life Terminator portrayed by Ah-nold, this new guy (whatever his name is), seems kind of ordinary. Evil, yes, but in a kind of secondary-minion way. Schwarzenegger's Terminator was a kind of mythological being, and looked every inch like it was unstoppable. This new guy doesn't really pull it off well at all. The story still works well, though, and so I'm going to finish it tonight and see what happens.

That's it for what I've been watching. I'm still following 24, but generally I've been a little too tired when I get home to post my thoughts about the show. Next week is the season finale, so I might do something then.