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Wednesday: September 01, 2004 - Steel Band Website As far as I'm concerned fall starts today. That means a new banner and a new color scheme for the month. Fall has always been my favorite season, just like everyone else. Unfortunately, living in Florida, the only difference between Fall and Summer is that a) the temperature drops into the 80s and hurricanes come more frequently. Apparently Hurricane Frances is on the way. I saw a couple different variations and of the possible 30 courses hurricanes have taken in the past with similar characteristics, only five of them have veered into Tallahassee. And of those, none of them have had hurricane strength winds. Oh well, maybe next time. Hopefully it won't hit Miami hard enough to stop the first FSU game of the season versus the hated University of Miami. Yeah, go back to Cuba. (Jamie and I heard that plenty last year when they came up here to play.) The good news for us is that they lost 12 players from last year and seven made it into the NFL. Hopefully this will translate into them sucking this year. The game is on Monday night at 8pm and, as far as I know, is going to be televised nationally on ABC. As long as it doesn't come down to a field goal kick.

I spent today working on the steel band site and applying for new jobs. I did receive good news, at 6:30 this evening that I would have a job starting tomorrow at the Department of Justice sorting mail. It sucks, yes, but it's $9.20/hr, which is better than what I'm making now sitting around at home. It will last almost the entire month, for better or worse. Chris made Jamie and I some rosemary chicken. Afterwards, Michael came back from rehearsal and we hit up Sonic for milkshakes. You might think I'd be excited about making $350/wk but I'm really not. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Thursday: September 02, 2004 - I hate being a temp What? You want to offer me a real job? Benefits? Insurance? 401...K? The? Well, don't mind if I do. Oh, I wouldn't start until my four-week Manpower contract is up? You don't care that I didn't make it in until 9:00am? Oh, I see, so I'd still have to write names on folders for the next four weeks with a Sharpie. Well, small price to pay.

Have to go! Can't be late! [Comments: 1]· permalink · · ·

Friday: September 03, 2004 - Hurricane Francis Hurricane Frances, where are you? It has been rumored you are moving at a whopping 5mph towards us. At that rate, assuming you took a straight line to Tallahassee from West Palm Beach, you'll be here in a little under three and a half days. However, if you followed that route, you'd weaken to nothing before you could even douse Gainesville and The Premier Music School Of The South. Come on now, step it up a bit, eh?

I have some more details for my new job. Let me first explain my old job. The Justice Administrative Commission is a new branch of the state government that essentially functions as a huge Accounts Payable department for the 20 circuit courts of the state. The lawyers send us their fees-per-case and we pay them. In order to be paid, however, we need to approve their charges. In the attempt of getting everything together, ever court-appointed lawyer in the state had to send us all of their paperwork since July 1st. You wouldn't think this would be very much, but unfortunately Florida, collectively, commits a ton of crimes. I had one of the smaller sections to start, Circuit 9, which is the Orlando area: Orange and Osceola counties. I had a little over 800 cases, which made about six accordion binders of papers. For each case I had to take an empty manila folder and write the following: 9 County Case Number. The problem is that the case numbers are really long and after using a Sharpie for a while, you have no choice but to write really big. Since most of the offenses were in Orange county, I took to figuring out all of the possible anagrams of "Orange". The biggest problem, though, was the fact no two people use the same case numbers. Therefore you could have Lawyer Jane Doe using DP-001 and Lawyer Chompy Doe using DP-001, one for a murder one charge and the other using it for the theft of a pack of gum from a three-year old. I literally did nothing but write that on folders for two days. It also made my old job at the chemical factory look good. At least I could walk around there.

My new job is "Records Manager". I will have at least one employee to do my bidding and that makes me excited. The down side is that although I start my new duties on Tuesday, I still have to work for the same horrible pay through Manpower until my contract ends in three weeks. At that time they sign me and do all the official things that go with having a real job. I don't know what these things are exactly because I've never had a real job before but I am certainly excited. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Saturday: September 04, 2004 - Pollproblem State Slowly but surely Frances is making her away across the Pollproblem State. We still have yet to have anything but beautiful weather here in the Panhandle, though. Apparently by the time it hits us tomorrow it will only be a tropical storm. From the recent news reports the eye has almost completely fallen apart but the problem is that now that its lost its power it's barely moving. It's supposed to slam into Tallahassee around noon tomorrow. I spent most of my day relaxing, watching college football. I placed first in my little pool on ESPN's College GameDay Pick'Em. Looking back I'm pleased with all my decisions but I don't remember choosing Tulane over Mississippi State...at all. I don't know what I would have made that selection. If given a second chance I still would have picked all the teams that wound up losing so I'm feeling pretty good that my errors were flukes. I was going to go to Publix to perhaps pick up an item or two but apparently the lines are insane so I'll just have to make do with what I bought for the last tropical storm...was it Bonnie? Something like that, some girl name. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Sunday: September 05, 2004 - Here comes Frances Still no big storms up here to speak of. My power was off for most of the afternoon and my fish were not particularly happy about that. The wind started to pick up around 9pm but it still hasn't rained very much. I spent the day glued to the Weather Channel and despite Tallahassee being engulfed in green, there was nothing at all going on here. From all accounts it appears the now-tropical storm has all but broken up. We're supposedly due for about 8" of rain over the next two days but I'll believe it when I see it.

=====September 5, 2004:Pupdate!=====

And here she comes. My power has been on and off all day. Argh, me maties. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Monday: September 06, 2004 - Guest Entry Steve (1) Well, Mike asked me to do a couple of journal entries for him. Why, I’m not really sure but I figured why not? Anyway, today really was spent doing nothing but trying to play catch-up from the long weekend. I spent my weekend watching movies, congratulating my friend for coming back from the strip club with a stripper, and hanging out with some friends who came into town. Man, not much really happens here. I spent some time tonight sitting around a bonfire hanging out with some people I haven’t seen in a really long time. It was a good time. After that, I really just tried to sit down and tried to make some progress on this coin project that I need to get out of the way. Basically, I have to construct everything that I can from 114 coins, and tell the story of Earth. Sounds like a really dumb project, but yet, there is something cool about it. I doubt that any of you have ever read the book, “Mystery Motel”, but I would recommend everyone read it. It is a children’s book, yet a child wouldn’t really get it. It is like all the little things that animators throw into Disney movies. I remember the first time I learned of this type of thing, I was with my friend Jimmy and he was adamant about showing me how messed up some of the Disney people are. I swear, we watched two scenes from Aladdin and the Lion King over 30 times trying to see the word “sex” appear in the flowers and to hear Aladdin tell Jasmine to “take off her clothes”. How horrible is that? Anyway, I just finished having a conversation with a guy about how guys shouldn’t dance. Why don’t girls recognize this? I am not gifted with any sort of rhythm, as my musical abilities show. But dancing, my GL, not even a basic move to save my life. Oh well, the white male really isn’t expected to dance thankfully. I realize that this isn’t the best entry, but hopefully something interesting will happen tomorrow. As for now, I’m going to go talk to my friend who wants to go to Hooters, right now, and is also going to get himself in heaps of trouble for wearing a shirt that I thought up for him. He is an El Ed major and he has a shirt that says “Western Illinois University El Ed” on the front. On the back it says, “Touching children daily.” He is going to get himself arrested, again.

======September 6, 2004:Mike=====

Nothing happened. That is all there is to report. I tried to make a favicon.ico today and while I thought it was a successful attempt it apparently was not, since nothing is showing up. The favicon is the little icon next to the address in your browser. If you look at Brian's page you'll see his little blue, slanted URI! coming down. I spent my whole day with Jamie and we hung out anticipating the storm that never happened and killed the day playing everything from canasta to poker to Madden 1990. I don't have to work tomorrow because all the state offices in Leon County are closed. Hoorah. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Tuesday: September 07, 2004 - Guest Entry: Steve (2) Today was really quiet and really busy. I got up too early and went to class, only to find that it was cancelled because my professor was foolish enough to go to Florida, Miami in particular despite the fact that a hurricane was coming in to ravage the landscape. Hopefully everyone down there is alright and she has come to realize that life is too short to continue teaching an awful class as poorly as an educated chimp. I spent some time then chatting with a different professor and talking about everything from politics to my future goals. Overall, the conversation was pretty damn worthless, but I did find out some information that might prove useful. After that I proceeded to go to another class where the professor read straight from his notes for the however many days I’ve been in class. His class is awful. Boring beyond belief. The only good thing is that we talked about birth order and the characteristics of each child. I laughed aloud at some of the crap they had to say about both the oldest and youngest child. Either way, having grown up the way I did, I think that it is a load of crap. After that I got to hear about how awful my partner’s step-cousins wedding was, all because the cousin married a whore after breaking her up from her first marriage. Got to love society and its trends. Next I went to my only good class and listened to all sorts of news about recent findings in historical research. Soon there after I proceeded to go and work with my group for two and half hours and we came up with nothing, I mean nothing, for a big project that we need to get done. It really sucked because there is only one other person who has a brain and is willing to use it. Well, maybe two, but he was too quiet to help the situation. After that I came home, grabbed a crappy dinner and then have been working all night to get through my piles of homework. I’m also in the hunt for some jobs and trying to straighten out some things with some former friends of mine. As of now, I’m watching the Cubs struggle to score some more runs and wondering what is wrong with Clement and how much it will impact the Cubs winning the World Series. That’s about it. A little fuller day than yesterday, but I can’t say much more interesting.

=====September 7:Mike=====

I had the day off work and spent it working on scores. Boring day all around for my family. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Wednesday: September 08, 2004 - Guest Entry Steve (3) Nothing happened again today. I woke up and found out that, in the words of Mike, “it was so cold that I needed to wear jeans.” Now normally that would be an alright sentence, except that being in Florida has spoiled him and that fact that weatherbug said it was 62 degrees outside would make him throw a sweatshirt and other heavy clothes on. I went to my classes and was bored out of my mind. Although my one class is getting better despite it being one of the hardest classes I think I will ever take. I also got around today to thinking that I want to go to a big school so that I can watch some football games. WIU recently played the Cornhuskers of Nebraska (we lost, but made $350,000 from the game) and heard that on game day, the stadium becomes the third largest city in the state. I think it would be cool to see that many people together cheering for a team. I know that at FSU that stadium most hold almost 90,000 people if not more. Damn, that’s a lot. Tonight I had a meeting to preside over and have been planning a picnic for one of the coming weeks. It’s been a pain to get it together, but hopefully everything will fall into place. On another note, I’m not feeling that great and it doesn’t have anything to do with the Cubs getting shutout tonight by a guy who was 2-7 coming into the game. Go Cubs, keep screwing with the hearts of the fans. I can’t wait until I get an ulcer when I’m 30 because of all the games you’ve blown, made close when they shouldn’t have been, or just played like crap. Yep, that’s it. I’m going to get some sleep tonight because I’m exhausted and don’t feel good in the least.

=====September 8, 2004:Mike=====

Oh my God. Steve, I love you like a brother but you are the only person to have a more boring life than me. Here's a little story about my crappy day. 6am: Wake up and check my email...no reply yet from a secret source (which will be revealed if he should reply). Made it to work on time. I went to see Vick-Vick about my new job duties but she was in a meeting. I sat outside her office for a few minutes then headed back to my lavish cubicle. I started sorting my previously scrawled-upon folders while admiring my decor of a single sheet of paper pushpinned to my wall that says: HE'S A SEMANOLE (sic) MAN! given to me by one of my fellow temps. Underneath the bastardization of the school's mascot the other temp, Nick (the token U-Miami fan), wrote: HATER HATER HATER!! Since I had nothing else hanging up I decided to leave it there, since the crumple-lines of the sheet of paper add a pleasant texture to the general aura of my cubicle. At 9:45 Wayne came in and told me Vick-a-Vac wanted me to sit in on a demonstration of the new $12k scanner we might buy. Two hours and a horrific presentation later I trudged back to my cubicle to get my phone and then head to lunch. But no. I ran into Immediate-Supervisor-Sharon. Sharon is the female version of the boss from Office Space but also a total bitch. She told me this afternoon I'd be working somewhere else to make up for the absence of another employee and that I wouldn't be doing folders like this morning. Irritated by the fact she calls me every m-name except for Mike or Michael, I offered that I hadn't been doing folders all morning and that my job this afternoon was to research other expensive scanners so we could bilk the taxpayers of Florida out of their hard earned property taxes. At this point she goes insane. She storms off and reminds me that I'm "just a temp" and to see her immediately after I got back from lunch. Kiss my ass, bitch. I didn't actually tell her to kiss my ass but just walked away fantasizing about me sitting in her office with my name on the plaque and reminding her that she's "just a bitch" and she was fired. The fantasy then moved to me running into her outside Publix and me saying (a la Family Guy), "I love to stay and chat but you're a total bitch". I walked down to City Hall to pay my electric bill and went back to work after a short lunch. Surprise, surprise, Thick-Glasses-On-A-Neon-Band-Sharon was still out to lunch and didn't come back until 2pm. In the meantime I hung out with my new employee (or, as my mom informed me, my direct-report) Cathy. Cathy has children older than me and quit her old job as a truck driver because her route made her drive past the place where her son died in a car accident. She and I are both pretty laid back but like to stay busy so that makes me happy. I finally caught up with Baby-Eating Sharon and she apparently got the Vicks-Vap-o-Rub smackdown. She told me a new temp was coming tomorrow to do my garish old job and that I was free to do whatever I was "supposed" to be doing. Cathy and I spent the next hour looking at other scanners online before some random woman walked into the extra cubicle where we were and asked if we were employees. I fought my gut reaction to tell her that the homeless shelter was full and we'd be staying here until our stamps came in and just nodded. She was concerned that we were tampering with the files she had stupidly left in the extra cubicle. My first duty as Record Manager is to purge all her files. Well, learn her name first. Then purge all her files. A few hours later our new supervisor, ???, ran into Cathy and gave her a new cubicle so I was left to checking my email the last 45 minutes of the day. Tomorrow I have absolutely no idea whatsoever as to what I'm supposed to do. God, I love my job. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Thursday: September 09, 2004 - Guest Entry: Steve (4) Today sucked. I studied my ass off and then got to class and didn’t have the test. In that sense it’s good. But, now I have two tests on Tuesday and both of them are going to be worthless. My classes are worthless. I got a decent nights sleep last night and all was good until some douche-bitch left his alarm going from 6:30-7:30 and I was kept up by it. Oh well, it’s not like I needed sleep or anything. I had some time today where I talked with one of my professors about a project. With the exception of him shooting down some of my major ideas, it was really worthwhile. I also planned some stuff out for an upcoming event with a couple of different groups. After that I came home only to find myself strung along on a long ass journey over to Walmart to look for a game that I swear doesn’t exist in this damn town and then eventually found myself stealing all sorts of goodies from Kmart and Taco Bell. Ahh, what a day. After that I came back and we all talked about what needed to be bought for this weekend. Joe’s turning 21 and it is our goal to get him blasted beyond belief. Hopefully it will work out and that antics that result from it will be included in later journal entries. On top of that, I have an incredibly busy weekend in which I have to get tons of projects done. But on to a different note. I sucked it up tonight at Poker. Well, I did alright, but nothing great. Only went up around a hundred bucks or so. I got off a lot better than Mike did. I also held a fencing clinic tonight. It was great except that now my chest is covered with bruises and a guy ripped my shirt even before the bout started. Such is the life of a guy trying to teach people to control their anger. Something odd about that statement. But speaking of fencing and anger, it takes me back to when I first started and I went up against this one left handed kid. He knew he had an advantage because lefties are gold in the sport since there are so few of them. Well anyway, he was a little dick and all he did was slap at me and try to hit me in the sack. So after a couple of minutes of this I slammed my pommel into his helmet and was all ready to go fight him when my instructor came up and told me I had to control myself. It was at that point that I learned a valuable lesson. Now usually, if this was some crappy movie I’d say that I learned I need to control my anger or that I should rise above it. No, I just learned to deal with that little dick on my own time when there isn’t someone I respect around to stop me from kicking his ass. Anyway, I saw that guy or a guy who looked like him the other day and I tripped him. Oh well. That’s my day.

=====September 9: Mike=====

You take the good, you take the bad and there you have the facts of life. I received word today that I would indeed be hired in two weeks and my starting pay would be $27k. It's more than I expected but I anticipate making more as I move along. My job title has both Liaison and Manager, so take that William and Mary. The bad news is that I lost $500 Yahoo dollars in poker. I made amends with the woman that asked me if I was an employee yesterday so I won't have to waste my time purging her files anymore. I found out one of my fellow temps is on probation...and is 21...and has three-year-old twins. Ah, temps. I'll miss being among your prestigious ranks. I have officially abandoned the fall color scheme because I just don't like it anymore. I also added a links page to the left frame. It's not made up all nice yet, but you get the idea. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Friday: September 10, 2004 - Guest Entry Steve (5)

Well, that sums it up. Steve, the slacker, didn't send me an update tonight.



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Saturday: September 11, 2004 - J-Kwon Not having access to booze quite as much as certain other family members, I spent another sober day at home working on scores. Jamie was nominated for one of those Student Stars things, which shows up when you log into Blackboard. I played someone online poker last night after working in Finale for a good eights hours only to lose $250, dropping me back under $1000 total. Good thing we're not playing with real money. I was going to make a graphic of Steve's head on a drosophila being accosted by some pigs in Mexico but I need to take out Die Chomp.

=====September 11, 2004:Pupdate!=====

J-Kwon would like to give Steve a little advice, "Teen drinking...is very bad. Yo, I got a fake ID, though..." [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Sunday: September 12, 2004 - Guest Entry Steve (6) Well my last entry really won’t be of any major significance to anyone. Having followed my life for a week now, I’m sure that everyone is aware of how boring it is. Such is my life though. This is the path that I’ve found myself on and for the most part there are nothing but minor changes associated with it on a daily basis. Today was spent with a quick scramble to make it to church on time. After serving as an usher, I quickly made my way back to the dorm where I did some homework. Soon there after we went out to the BBQ and had a good time. We had about 20 or so people show up and the food was pretty good. I can say this after I almost threw up earlier from all the grease I inhaled in the process of eating 6 cheeseburgers. After some volleyball and football, football being the more dangerous of the two sports since Tim cut his entire right arm up when jumping into a tree and Paul banged up his right arm as well. Tim will likely have a very nice scar when all is said and done. Since I got back, I have not really done anything except some homework and taken the occasion break. There is much that I can say. I’ll go out on the same dull note that I started all of this on. So with that, I think that I’m done.

=====September 12, 2004=====

Since nothing happened today, I had to resort to using one of my stock-pictures. I didn't write a stock-update to go with it so I guess I'm going to have to fake it. Oh, I've got it. October 9th: There's a football game and it's my birthday. If you live in the area, you're cordially invited to Birthday Poker Night. That's it. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Monday: September 13, 2004 - Frameless Site Design I guess now that Steve's entries are officially done the job of boring people falls to me once again. Rest assured I will not let you down. Even though I only got about three hours of sleep I was glad to be awake at 6am after the scary dream I had. I got ready quickly but Chompy refused to go in the backyard. Eventually I relented and took her out the front (stupid me). I saw Google had updated this site today...but again, the frames made it not work so well (at all). I was especially productive at work today and got to meet some of my coworkers. Everything was going fine with my duties: take a big box of papers, go through sheet by sheet and determine if we need to keep it or toss it according to Florida's policies on public records. I was hauling for a good three hours and the morning was flying by. And then...I opened up one of our Terminated Employee boxes (my favorite because I get to read about the dumb things past employees have done to get canned). I was about halfway through the box when I pulled out a folder and set it on my lap. I opened it up and there was a dead, 3" roach, laying on it's back, flashing me its bits. Naturally, I screamed and everyone came into my cubicle. Maybe it's because I'm the only male in my area, or because I'm a total dorkus when it comes to bugs, all the women had a good laugh at me. And none of the scooped it up. So now there's a dead roach laying on my floor, right near all the papers I have to clean up. Being a good employee, I dragged a box of trash over the scary carcass and moved to another cubicle on the other side of the building. My new cubicle was closer to the boxes and I quickly filled up all three of the offices trash bins. Except they weren't trash bins. On the side it says: When this is full, you've saved half a tree. Proud of the tree and a half I saved I bragged to the woman who had once asked me if I was an employee. She then told me those were for shredding purposes only and that we had to pay per paper we send out to be shred. Since I put about 2500 papers in those bins today, that's not good. I had no choice but to tell a white lie and say they were classified records (those need to be shredded). Hopefully that will be the secret of the soon-to-be-rich shredding guy and me alone. The afternoon dragged by and as soon as I got home (in six minutes) I took a nice little nap despite Marty reminding me how much I despite a particular so-and-so who appears to be up to his lying again. I watched the Packers game and worked on my new frames-less page. Viola! [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Tuesday: September 14, 2004 - Stupid Google, Stupid Me Stupid Google. The Yahoo cache of my page worked great, frames and all. I didn't realize this until this morning when I was at work, well after I had taken down my frames page. I had a serious case of the no-sleepies last night and didn't fall asleep until sometime after 3am. For the first time since I started working regularly, my body did not perk up when my alarm went off a solid three hours later. I got up to shut it off still semi-dreaming. Rather than checking my email and petting Chompy, as my morning routine usually dictates, I decided to (quite literally) jump back into bed. I woke up again at 7:42. Eek. I had already resigned myself to being late so I didn't hurry, but I did cut out all of the non-essential parts of my morning routine and made it work by 8:10. Good thing I live so close. Still exhausted, I zombied my way through the boxes, purging as much as my tired arms would let me carry at a time. I discovered a new recycling bin today, which was good because I had filled up all the other ones. Having a flash of artistic genius, I decided to make an art piece out of throwing away thousands of sheets of paper into this enormous tub. For six hours I accumulated about twelve reams of paper that were to go in this bin then made my way across the floor to it. I painstakingly laid out the papers around the edges, building a paper-hurricane. By the time I was done, the pages were about four and a half feet tall and, by God, it looked like a paper hurricane. Lacking a camera on my phone, I decided I'd bring my camera tomorrow to photograph it. But no. With a half hour of work remaining, the head of human resources told me about this box that she had in her office that for some reason was not with the rest of them. I quickly filed through it and gathered another 150 pages or so to complete the stratosphere level of the hurricane. I get back to my room and there's a 500 page report destroying the western eye wall. Panicking, I set my own papers aside and try to to resurrect my piece. It was too late. The damage inflicted upon my Category Five Paper-Hurricane was catastrophic. Below the report was another 50 pages or so, scattered and smashed in to make more room on the top for the report. Once I saw the damage was not repairable I threw my remaining papers on top of the report with the staples still in them (out of protest). I sulked back to my office to make a Post-It note boat when I was caught by the boss-boss, Vicki and the head of IT, Roy. Roy told me that he was short a person in web design and asked if I wouldn't mind helping out. I agreed because at least I know there won't be any roaches coming out of my machine. My regular boss (Wayne) gets back from a couple days off tomorrow and hopefully he can tell me how to get the score of boxes out of our office. He and I are most likely going to a Records Management meeting on Thursday. That will be less than fun, I'm sure, but afterwards I get a certificate of somesort if I understand things correctly. I tried to figure out what the certification meant tonight and found out there's actually a group of Certified Records Managers. You have to take this six-part test and have all these crazy qualifications to join. Correct me if I'm wrong, and I might be, but if we lived fifty years ago, wouldn't we just be file clerks?

Chris and I met up for Gordo's this afternoon and man, it hit the spot. Jamie was verbally assaulted by some gold-chain wearing 18 year old Miamian for parking across the street in front of his house. I was able to come up with a lot of revenge tactics, so I'm feeling pretty good about that situation. In other news, the Cubs finally won a close game. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Wednesday: September 15, 2004 - Hurricane Ivan This insomnia is no good. With my box project done at work I had nothing to do for a couple hours in the morning. Coupled with it being extremely and my eyes drying out, it was a certain cause of sleep. I did my best to fight it but still nodded off a few times. Things cleared up when I finally got put in charge moving all this crap from the storage room up to our new storage floor. At my disposal were the three mailroom guys, so I got to practice my "bossing" skills. Once we lugged all the stuff up with these huge carts, I let them go and moved all of my boxes myself. I didn't do this out of the goodness of my heart, I did it because I was afraid that if I let them help I'd once again have nothing to do and fall asleep again. I finally got the dozen boxes I needed upstairs and went to lunch. I met Jamie at CFA and we chowed quickly before I returned for the second half of my boring day. My immediate boss, Wayne, decided I could start scanning the files that I had brought upstairs. I was irritated that he didn't tell me this until after he had told me to move them all upstairs. Once I got it down I spent the next three hours pulling staples and sending things through the scanner with periods of nodding off. I got home, took a nap, and hung out with Jamie and Abby while we balked at Ivan. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Thursday: September 16, 2004 - Ivan Day Off Ivan caused another day off, so I spent the day working on scores. For dinner Jamie made a surprisingly good cheesy chicken dish. As I was going to bed, I noticed one of the dogs peed (a lot) in my bed. How happy was I? Not very. I'm betting on Ab. Sorry, Jamie.



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Friday: September 17, 2004 - Sharing Wyatt Aside from a great day at work, I was supposed to teach my first lesson with Chris Rix backup, Wyatt. Apparently, Mark Connor was supposed to do the same thing. Foolishly, Wyatt didn't tell us about each other and we ended up choosing the same meeting time and place. Once we figured out what was going on we decided we didn't want to be played. Not that it mattered--he didn't show up. Work went by really quickly and I got a lot done. After work I discovered Chompy was gone--stolen by Jamie to play at her parents' house with The Ab. It seems Chompy was not on her best behavior, probably because I wasn't there to exert my cruel authority. Jamie went to Michael's concert and I stayed home and slept. Tomorrow I hope to finish up the last of my scores and watch some football. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Saturday: September 18, 2004 - Beef O'Brady Wings FSU dominated Abby's alma mater, UAB this afternoon. Jamie brought some chicken wings from Beef O'Brady's since we are officially boycotting BW3's and their terrible service. I spent the rest of my day watching football and working on scores. And making the world's worst gif. That's a football, not poop.

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Sunday: September 19, 2004 - More Scores Yet another day of scores. All day. Except for an hour with Jamie and making that picture. Hopefully they'll be done tomorrow.

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Monday: September 20, 2004 - Happy Birthday Grandma Doris! It's 3am and I just finished my penultimate score. It was hard. (Happy birthday, Grandma Doris!) [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Tuesday: September 21, 2004 - State Jobs Even though I only got about three hours of sleep, I managed to get up on time. I got to work a little bit late, but was able to sneak into my back-wall cubicle before anyone noticed. I stayed busy for a good hour before the lack of sleep caught up with me. I continued to pull staples out of people's personnel files while fighting the sleep-sleeps. Trying to stay mentally active, and having a cubicle far from the beaten path, I had what seemed like a great idea. I would do The Robot while I scanned papers. I figured moving around even that little bit extra would give my brain the extra blood. Tuning my mental radio to the All-Devo station, I started doing the sitting-robot while I scanned. Things were going well, real well. At some point, the HR director was standing behind me. I have no idea how long she was standing there and how much of my impromptu performance she saw. She wasn't smiling, and she's about my age, so I gather she must have just caught the ending snippet. She told me that I was to come with her into the 2nd-In-Commands office to talk. Not sure how to reply since she had just seen my dancing, I told her my eyes were dry. Quick thinking right there. Apparently they didn't hold my dancing against me. #2 told me that Manpower had agreed to release me of my contract early and I, with two other temps, would be on the payroll as of tomorrow. I called Jamie to tell her the news, but she wasn't there. I then text-messaged Chris (look at me, Mr. High-Tech) to see if he wanted to go to Gordo's with me. He did. It occurred to me that I had no money, though. I remembered my security deposit in the car...but wait--I wanted to appeal their less-than-generous offer. I quickly drafted up a message filled with various legal terms I'd read after going through hundreds of personnel files. I printed it off on our JUSTICE KICKS ASS letterhead and went over. Manny, my former landlord, was surprisingly nice when he saw me and he said he'd take care of the difference. I then hopped over to the Bank of America to deposit the check and get some lunch money. Chris beat me there by a bit, judging on his parking space. We pigged out and then returned back to our respective laboring. I made it back to work around 1:25...a little later than I probably should have. Knowing I was late for the second time in one day, I went up the back stairs and made it back to the cubicle unseen. Flopping into my chair, I decided I'd go and check a little email. I loaded up all the sites using the mandated IE and was just looking at the unblocked popup of online casinos when Mrs. HR comes in behind me again. I quickly try to close the pop-ups but there's so many of them, I can only get to about half. She probably thought I was looking at porn or something. I was just checking my email! She said something to the effect of that she was happy to finally find me after lunch and that we could finally get to the orientation program that I apparently delayed by a half-hour. I signed all the paperwork and went back to work. Ok, so I had a late day--there is no way they could find anyone to my job as fast as I can (assuming I'm not tired). Within the safety of my state job, life is good. I have a performance review in three months, so I have to make sure I work buku overtime between now and then so I can get my 5-10% raise. After work I mailed the last two scores and took a nap. Jamie and I hit the Wizard of OG for dinner and then I came back and worked on the last piece, a very very very weird arrangement of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen that is crazy-tough for the inner voices (and transcriber). [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Wednesday: September 22, 2004 - I'm A State Employee Today was my first day as an employee for the state of Florida. Even though I got no sleep (No sleep, Jerry!) I made it almost on time. Unlike yesterday when I was able to work my way through Zombieville, today I took the liberty of nearly falling asleep a number of times. The morning was horribly slow. Around lunch I set up my phone with the tutorial (we have very fancy phones). It went smoothly until I tried calling my voice mail from someone else's phone and heard "--ddamit, is this even recording?" (the first syllable was cut off) instead of my warm greeting as the Manager of Public Records at Extension 303. Recording over it required a number of grueling steps and I ended up calling random people for a good ten minutes before I was able to finally get the right message complete with the inner-desperation of a seasoned employee. And it was only my first day! I grabbed a very fast lunch and took a refreshing nap in the car while listening to some story on mental illness on NPR. Rejuvenated, I returned to my scanning. I was in my groove when I was stopped by some woman who told me I had to go to a meeting. I showed up in the conference room and quickly learned that I was now responsible for the entire website. And to make matters more pressing, I had to build a new one to be presented to Jebby Friday afternoon. The current website, while not aesthetically pleasing, still gets the job done. You can check out my handiwork under the "Administrative Orders" section. Yeah, that right--I made some of those links. Ah, that's why I make almost $30k a year. The worst part of the meeting was not that I suddenly had responsibility and was now being counted on to do something quickly and correctly, but the former webmaster has this lazy eye...I was sitting at an angle where his lazy eye was "looking" at me the whole time. I couldn't see the other eye from this unfortunate angle, so I never knew if he was looking at me or not. He was sitting across the table from me and to my right was the woman who told me about the meeting. Eye and I were trying to tell Jessica (ah, I finally remembered a name!) that it was not necessary to have Word, Excel, pdf, WordPerfect, and text versions of every downloadable file when I started to think about something random. A couple seconds later I mentally came back into the conversation but oh no! Eye was just finishing up a question. Was it to me? He was (I guess) looking at me. But he could have been looking her, too. Fortunately some part of my brain was listening and it remembered hearing "make pdf" and "Article V". I pieced together that he asked, "Do you remember making the pdf of Article V?" But the time I assembled this thought Jessica was looking down and Eye was still, possibly, looking at me. Figuring it was something I might have done when I wasn't sure which method to post from a previous web-assignment I figured I'd go for it and offered a very hearty "Yes!". At this point they both looked at me and said, "What?" Eye double-looked at me and said, "What are you talking about? I was talking to her." Although I didn't blush, I could definitely feel the beads of sweat rolling down the I-10 that is my head. And man, the more I think about how much I'm sweating the more I do it. AND now I'm afraid to say anything. I sit in near-silence the rest of the meeting and try to play it cool. Afterwards, I scurried back to my cubicle and scanned papers until 5:20pm (because dedicated employees get raises <MIKE="raise">now</MIKE>). I hit Publix on my way back and ran into Alex. I told him to call me to play tennis but I'm willing to bet he won't. He's afraid. And he should be. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Thursday: September 23, 2004 - Biotch What a frustrating day. Well, it was. This is one of my favorite types of journal entries...the belated type. I spent quite literally all day working on a stupid form for my new website at work. This form was made as a "form" in MS Word 2003 and I must say, it looked good. Real good. Beyoncé good. My problem was trying to make html look like that. I suggested (along with everyone other than the boss-boss, Vicki) that we just make it into a pdf form, since we have that new PDF Writer that I've been wanting to try. But no. She wants the forms in html--just because.

As if that wasn't painful enough, my first two attempts in Dreamweaver were terrible. I figured it could be that different than FrontPage, which I use here because, well, it's pretty easy to use. The attempts were laughed at by the IT guys and the acted as though I had made them as a joke. It looks like I'll have to brush up on my table-building skills on HTML tonight and do it completely from scratch tomorrow (and since it's a belated-entry, I do brush up and you'll be pleased to know everyone loves my new form). The only high point in the day was when I was scanning a couple of files and I came to the last name Beotch. Biotech... [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Friday: September 24, 2004 - Learn HTML Today was a good day at work. Dare I say, a great day. My from-html-scratch form (as mentioned in my previous post) was a hit and I finally made it to the interesting boxes to scan. The most interesting file was on a woman named Sch*****. She was/is a huge advocate of keeping killers, serial rapists, etc alive and won notoriety in Florida for keeping prisoners out of the chair (well, chamber). Apparently when the now defunct CCR hired her, everyone from the governor to the other employees to us taxpayers threw a huge fit and started sending all this hate mail, which ended up in her personnel file. It made for some interesting reading. I also stumbled across a thesis on male prostitution in Charlotte, NC. Jamie came over for a home cooked pot roast. It was a little on the dry side but on the whole, it was pretty damn delicious. It's not as good as my mom's but in my defense, I think she holds the #1 spot in the world for pot roast cooking. Jamie and I were about halfway through the atrocious My Big Fat Greek Wedding when she got a rape call. Poor Jamie. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Saturday: September 25, 2004 - Clemson Sucks Thank God we beat Clemson. Had we lost, I might be dead after the fight that would have ensued. Somehow, Jamie and I had seats directly between the FSU student section and the Clemson students section, who came down in droves. And not good, like cash droves. Like, bad, over-privileged, racist, obnoxious, old-money droves. Within the first five minutes of the game, we were all yelling back and forth. Since Jamie and I were in the last row, the Clemson kids would come right up to us and our guys would come storming back. In one particularly unfortunate situation, one of them thought it might be fun to taunt me by waving his arms in my face. Already in the mob mentality I was ready to grab him and fling him over the side into our section where our beefy guys and extremely vicious sorority girls would have eaten him alive. No really, the FSU girls were complete and total bitches, ready to f*** up any gendered Clemson fan. After one of their especially obnoxious celebrations (after the safety) one of the Clemson leader-fans' sandals came off right by us. In a surprisingly aggressive move, Jamie grabs it and chucks it down a half-dozen rows while this idiot is turned around. He realizes his sandal is missing a couple minutes later and can't find it. Oh well. Go Jamie! The best part was her throw hit some beefy FSU guy and he thought the fans above threw it, so he was all screaming at them to come down and fight. I learned that Clemson loves to talk and talk but at the first sign of physical harm they run like hell before they get their tucked in dress shirts and jeans, and plantation dresses dirty. What's worse was just the blatant disrespect on the whole. In addition to their band playing over ours, over the people being honored for their duty in the Gulf War and over our student-Olympians, the fans behind us were heckling this poor, nerdy guy sitting by us. He was really unattractive: skinnier than me and had no chin. The whole Clemson section, including adults up to 40 would chant things like Sen-ior Vir-gin! There were many, many more but that was the only one that is printable this is G-rated column. God, this poor guy. And there's like 200 people chanting at him. Everything he did, they'd start a new, demeaning chant. AND there's a bunch of kids sitting by us with their parents and these Clemson assholes are screaming c*** and other less-than-savory words right in the kids faces. Finally, they were making fun of us, collectively, for being ugly. Ok, good one. Look in a mirror any time lately? I personally would like to nominate Clemson University as the most overweight college in America. Ok, they had some hot southern girls but they all had that dainty finishing-school walk which looks like their boyfriends had broken their backs in a horrible, yet silent case of abuse (the Southern Way). So, Clemson, I hate you. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Sunday: September 26, 2004 - Chompy's Nest What a long night. Seriously. While apparently I'm capable of preventing hurricanes from smashing into Tallahellsee, I have no power to stop tropical depressions. My power was out last night from around 10ish, come back on just enough to make sure all the filters in my fishtanks would suck in enough water to cause them to stop working entirely. Somewhere between 12:30 and 1am, I hear a huge thud, like Chris Farely falling off a ladder and dying next door. At the same time, the power goes out (again). Thinking it was one of my neighbors, I stumbled in the dark for some pants made it out about ten minutes later. All my neighbors were congregated around talking about this fallen tree. It had fallen into a power line. While we were all hanging out in the pitch black, one of the city vans came out and after talking to some people told us that those of us on my side of the town houses weren't allowed back in because the line had fallen into a newly developed lake of water in someone's backyard. Exhausted, I took Chompy and we climbed into the Taurus to ride out the wait. Why did we have to not be in our apartments? Whatever. Around 4:30am I woke up and everyone was gone and went back inside. It was roughly three hundred degrees (Kelvin) and the power was still off. I set my cell phone alarm for 7am. When it went off I had been asleep for about an hour, completely naked on the couch downstairs. I was still soaked in sweat and my desire for fresh linens was the only thing that got me out of bed. As I climbed up the stairs towards the shower I realized the bad news--still no power. Sleepwalking through my powerless morning, I let Chompy out, fed her and sat in my semi-cleaned kitchen waiting for someone from work to come by my house with an order of Chick-Fil-A and a note saying I didn't have to go to work. At 7:30 the power finally came back on. I put Chompy in her cage and got in the car. As I was turning the car on I realized I had left my windows open. A few seconds later, I see this head--this dog-head. Did I forget to lock Chompy's nest/cage? Yes. Did I forget my wallet? Yes. Belt? Yes. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Monday: September 27, 2004 - I need a raise What a long day. Is there any other response to such a long night? I made it to work close to on time, although a misswallow of Coke upon my arrival almost left me honking out my car door. About two hours into work I received the dreaded news--I was going to be relocated. I really like my cubicle. I have a direct path to the door and no on ever comes by me unless they specifically need to talk to me about something. And since no one knows what exactly I do, no one ever comes to talk to me. Not anymore. I've been drafted by the IT department to build websites for the circuit courts as well as ours. The circuit courts I have to myself, so I can make them as hideous as I want--the others I'm stuck with a couple other people, not that the two of them have invited me back since Eye caught me in a look-down. From 3:30pm on I had nothing to do so I wasted the taxpayers money by building ships out of post-it notes. I figured someone online must have tried it before but I couldn't find any directions so I made my own as I went (and a few thousand prototypes later, I had it). When I got home I was in the mood to make this page look a little bit nicer so I started in on that. Hopefully it will be ok by October. The new site will still be frameless but it will look a little less remedial (I'm hoping, anyway). [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Tuesday: September 28, 2004 - Dull State Life Bleh. Man, when you work, there is just nothing to talk about. I finished scanning the major players from the past branch of the government, concluding my work soap-opera. The box with the missing people showed up but two of the all-star players had these tiny files. As I read through what little there was, they apparently had their records subpoenaed as they were leaving and took the liberty of taking out all of the things that would have made my job interesting. Hopefully my book will come soon. I took a nice nap during my lunch break but woke up with a huge red welt on my face from where the corner of the seat was resting on my forehead as well as a sleeve splattered with BBQ sauce from lunch. This afternoon we had a meeting about the fancy phones and timesheets. I'm an inclusive employee, which means I really don't get much of anything. I don't get comp time as I thought, but overtime, assuming it's approved. That sucks. One of my coworkers told me that he's been working for the state for two years and now gets five weeks off per year. Wow, five weeks. I also finally got my supervisor assigned today but I have a feeling he and I will cross paths only via email and for me to drop off my time card. I might be coming down with a cold of some sort. I blame Julia, the girl on the outside of my cubicle fort, who had been sick for the past week. I'll most likely finish the rest of the nobodys with the scanning tomorrow and then I'll move onto making websites. I was excited about it until I saw how fancy some of the existing ones are. There are a lot of things I can't do and, even worse, things that would take a long time to learn. One of the things I certainly can't do is this--make those drop-down boxes that are partially transparent. Eek. I can't even get those rollover boxes to work, let alone with all the features they want. I might suggest something along the lines of a former student. Oh well, what can you do? The one they want to base it on is this one and you can see (if you use IE) the way the options kind of cascade down. The extent of my knowledge is something like this: it uses an array. Thank you, thank you. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Wednesday: September 29, 2004 - I HATE WORKING FOR THE STATE I found out my new location at work isn't a cubicle...it's a long table against a wall. That sucks. I am also, without a doubt, sick. More details later... [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Thursday: September 30, 2004 - Webmaster of Yee-Haw County My God, Chompy. I feel awful. I spent all day working on this stupid website and the people who want it out in YeeHaw County won't even email me back to tell me what they want. Since I was loudly sick at work, people avoided me, giving me time to think of ways to spite these Third Circuits for their inability to communicate. I made some really trashy image-swap pictures. In fact, right now all of the images have swaps....Florida State Courts gets a crudely drawn MS Paint gavel across the middle....the Columbia courthouse gets a smiling Mr. Sun, etc. None of them are particularly offensive, which is fine. Then they won't know if I'm being serious or not and maybe not say anything about the subtle gif where a car drives in and out of the Taylor County Courthouse parking lot. I got home from work and immediately slept. Chompy has been a total bitch all night and woke me up around 7:30pm. Speaking of sleep, I slept in five minute increments last night. It was horrible. The only good thing that happened was that I finally was able to get a basic box-spewing navigation bar. It's remedial but it works. Tomorrow is most likely my last day in my old office. I should probably empty out my stockpile of used Kleenex from the drawers. And boxes. And cabinets. Why isn't the WB showing the election debate? I don't even know what shows are on the WB anymore. Competing for the time slot, MTV will be showing "Pimp My Ride". Hooray for America! [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·