Bleah. You know, on the day after I go apartment visiting and thus get about five hours of sleep, I actually have to stay 'cause of having the X at work.

Lemme explain the X though. People are prone to not showing up at Elmore Academy. There's no attendance policy ... so nothing's really done about it. However, since it is what it is, if someone doesn't show, someone from the previous shift has to cover. The X is who is the first cover person on the night shift. The O is the second person. After that, it's every dorm for itself. This system only exists on the night shift. An expanded version (with ON CALL) would be great for the day shift though.

Anywho. I looked at an apartment in Blue Earth at 8am, then went home and slept. Then showered, made lunch and looked at an apartment in Elmore at 4pm. Then I called Paula, intending to sleep in my car. I never was able to fall asleep. Of course. If I had been smart, I would have gone to work and slept in the empty dorm. Chief Joseph. Eh.

One of the people was out sick and I was the X. Soooo, I had to cover. Thankfully, they'd called out on the phone and I only had to cover four hours of the shift and then another fella would pick up the rest. Yay for that. Although a truly organized system would have an ON CALL person on the PM shift that does that. Ah well.

I forgot to mention in the previous entry that I bought The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten at Shopko the other day. They were six-dolla hardbacks. How could I possibly resist? Even though they aren't my favorite books, they are good and quite different.

Oh! I also called the MN DMV to get my license straightened out. Yay for that. Um. I don't think there's anything really newsworthy left to cover.

I suck at flashlights.

I don't actually have a whole lot of news for this entry. I'm more or less a boring individual these days who just goes to work, sleeps, reads books and watches TV. The first two activities take up most of my time. Whoda thunk?

Work is fun. I like talking about how the place is managed and stuff like that. Hopefully, when I've been around for awhile, I'll be able to get trained as the night point person. Which basically means I'm the go-to decision maker for the night. It's something I'd like to know how to do - and it would look good on a resume. And they just lost two of their trained people on it.

Yay for coming in at a good time. Although I wish I'd been around when the old night supervisor had quit so I could have had a shot at that. It looks like one of the easier jobs in the salaried part of the whole gig. Other than the more office-y type jobs, which I'm pretty sure would go to a Team Leader/Group Leader more logically. If they apply.

Um. I hope to have an apartment somewhere within the week. I have been preliminarily accepted at an apartment complex in Elmore, but I'm hoping that the apartment in Blue Earth will come through. It pays for more and it's closer to Paula. And costs less. It's full of good features. Except for contacting me about what's happening with it.

Wow. I wrote more than I thought I would.

Oh, my car gets 22.8 miles to the gallon, according to my calculation.

I've recently read The Three Musketeers and The Bone Collector and am working on The Count of Monte Cristo. Libraries are good things. And Jeffrey Deaver book was surprisingly good, for a mystery-thriller novel. Oh noes, I have a low opinion of genre fiction. Bad snobby me.

As aforementioned in the previous entry, I now have a car. It's a 2002 dark blue PT Cruiser with a sunroof, roof racks, heated seats and loads of cool awesome-itude. I also got a bumper-to-bumper three year warranty. I always have some kind of trouble with cars, so that sorta made sense to me.

4 days at Elmore Academy. It's a cool job, although I need to get a whole lot better at rummy. I'm getting the pants beat off me every night. I also need to switch from turkey sandwiches for my packed lunch, I think. Darn that tryptophan. At least that's what I'm pretty sure it is.

I got to do inventory on a new intake's stuff last night. Which means I write down everything that he had when he came in. Some of the stuff had to get taken away, of course. Like opened toothpaste and deodorant. They could be smuggling in stuff that way. One of the kids had been kicked out of his last placement for smuggling cocaine in.

Fun job!

I can never figure what to put for them, you see. Emails, LJ posts, thread starters. Bleah. They are a pox upon my existence. I had a names guy when I was in VI for a reason.

Tonight was fun. I escalated a kid to a staff intervention for the first time! Yay me!

*coughs* I feel so very unsure of myself doing so much of this stuff.

EDIT: I got a car.

Um, I've had my first two days of work. It was nice, although the dorm I'm working in is on the top floor of the building, so it's pretty unbearably hot up there. Well, not quite so much unbearable as quite uncomfortable. It's not really all that bad as I was reading Pratchett's Going Postal and playing rummy with my coworker for a lot of it.

I've started calling around apartments and finding prices on them and all. I must admit I'd never heard of setting rent by the income of the people renting it. It's just odd, to me. I'd think the cost of renting would be something that's flat rate. But I suppose they get government subsidies for renting them out at lower prices for those who can't really afford it.

I meant to go looking for a car this morning, but I didn't set my phone alarm correctly so I slept longer in my morning nap than I wanted to. So then I decided to just sleep and set the OTHER alarm incorrectly, so I didn't get up until 6pm. I guess I needed it. So I'll go looking tomorrow morning, I suppose. I have the loan and all, so as soon as I find the car that I want (well, that will do), I can buy it. Yays.

Falar out.

I have a new cellphone! Due to me calling Sha every day over the last month and a bit, I ran up an enormous phone bill on the phone at home. Enormous. $275. So, I just got a phone with her service so we can talk for free. Yay for mobile-to-mobile freeness. And, when the service gets rolled up into Alltell, we should get a five to call.

Hmm. That's gonna be hard. I don't know if I know five people I call a lot. Mainly I call Paula a lot and that's about it.

My Blank Check(tm) loan from Capital One is in the mail so I should be getting that early next week. This means that I'll be able to go pick up a car from a used car dealership somewheres. I'm still not sure what kind of car I want. Okay, so I do know some things.

1. Not a Truck
2. Not an SUV
3. Not a Van
4. Not a Ford
5. Preferably a Manual Transmission, but that's a luxury issue
6. Working heat and air
7. 20+ MPG

So I'll probably take that list to the car dealership and see what they have...

I've had my first overnight at Elmore Academy, even though it was just a shadow. There appears to be about an hour and a half (or more) of just plain paperwork, then we sit around for the rest of the night. People played rummy, did crosswords, read, joked, called each other names and such. I think I sense a time where I can get some real work done on my novels.

I had a strange crossover Dresden Files/Law and Order dream. We won't get into it much, but suffice to say that Jack McCoy was defending Harry Dresden before the White Council. (High Council from the TV show.)

Um. I'm alive. There's nothing really to talk about.

I think I already mentioned that I'm waiting to see my first paycheck from Elmore before I actually get hard into looking for a car. So. That's as concerns the whole car aspect. Oh, I don't have my license yet. It's still in the paperwork process. Minnesota is weird. In West Virginia, I'd have it before I left the building.

An apartment (or just somewhere else to be) will be waiting until I have a car. I know I could get an apartment in Elmore and walk to work ... but being within walking distance of where troubled kids know me as an authority figure ... might not be advisable. And I couldn't get to see Paula as much.

Kmart amuses me. They're still understaffed in the office. They're understaffed in the eatery as well, due to the till thief in there getting fired. Which was need-to-know information. That he got fired, that is. Everyone else thought that he quit. But I guess people aren't knocking down doors to work at Kmart. Doesn't surprise me.

That's about it.

So, this morning, I had my pre-employment physical for working at Elmore Academy.

I'm who I am, so I went early to make sure I could find the place, fill out paperwork, etc. There was some paperwork to fill out, but not a whole lot. The physical itself (including paperwork and pre-physical examination) took maybe, at the most, ten minutes.

I was there for about two hours. First, got there early, no bigs. The rest? The doctor was on-call in the ER. I took a book (Jim Butcher's Death Masks, omgilovedresden), so it wasn't all that onerous. Just an amusing anecdote to share.

I passed the physical. Now I just have to turn in my application (I'm guessing for paperwork reasons or some such), a release for them to check my references and get my drug test. Today!

And go to work, of course. By the way, Kmart is not a good employer in my estimation. I'm closing in electronics and then opening in the cash cage (off at 10:15ish pm, back at 6:00am) again. After they told me repeatedly that this was a bad thing to do and they wouldn't do it again. Rar at them. Of course, their other employee in the office got fired and their other trainee decided he didn't want the cash cage, so they're strapped for office associates. ... Not, however, for electronics smucks. NO LOVE.

Um. Other than that, still looking at cars. I sorta want to see my first check from the Academy before I jump though. For a variety of reasons, one of those being just how much I can afford to spend and all.

Really pumped for whenever the Dresden Files RPG comes out. It looks like a lighter-rules way of getting the feel that I love about Shadowrun. And comes with what I consider to be a much cooler background. And much more straightforward rules where you can be the utter cool without being an utterly cheesy superwarrior/mage/hacker man.