I'm glad I have a break after tonight because I've got far too much stuff to talk about.

Including, but not limited to, predictions, humor, queasiness, shutting out the new guy, redoing things right, leadership, having a big vocabulary, cards, paperwork, fear, being late, getting overtime, being John Malkovich, which member of Law And Order I am and being able to kick some righteous donkey.

Today, my new boss called in to say he wouldn't make it. I had to stay for him.

There will be an entry later by the title of, "You always bring me the best violence."

So, for Hallowe'en, we weren't actually to do a full costume at work. It was "Funny Hat Day" and you were supposed to wear a funny hat. On pain of pain. Well ... not much pain. Maybe an expression of displeasure. From whoever sent out the memo, which no one actually knew who said it. But there's a lot of that ... "Please see me in my office" on an unsigned memo. I mean ... what?

I decided to go as far as I probably could and still keep with the dress code. To that end, the following costume was developed:

• Top Hat
  From my sister. Has a carnation made from crepe, a pipecleaner and tape on it.


• Tinted Glasses
  I took my old prescriptions and duct taped yellow transparent plastic to the lenses and covered the frames in duct tape. Black.


• Wig
  It's just a grey hair wig, about down to the shoulders


• Coat
  I call it my dockworker coat. It's nice and leather and kinda old-style gangster.


• Fingerless Gloves
  That cost a buck. Cut off. Knitted so they look nice and unraveled


• Pace Stick
  A three foot dowel covered in black duct tape and has white foam clear taped to the top

I don't have any pictures, but I'm sure that Sha will make me dress up in it when she's here and then you'll get a picture. It was decided by the staff of Liberty and some of the kids that I was obviously dressed up as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and had a crowbar to go with the pace stick.

Also, this is some good rap.

"Hovemeyer probably wrote his own vows. Dirty Harry Potter vows. 'I want to put my wand in your Chamber of Secrets.'"

In other news, I'm now in charge of a dorm at work. It's a bit strange.

EDIT: Also, this comic is pretty great.

I haven't really updated here in a while. Not a lot of note has happened. That I can think of. I suppose I can talk about a few things though. Oooh! I can put them in cool little topic headings so you can see what you're reading about! I'll even LJ-cut them for those of you who don't want to see what I'm talking about without a warning.

( On Movies )

( On Books )

( On Fate-renity )

( On Work )

( A Piece of Writing )

So, this morning, there were three open shifts. Which meant three people had to stay for full shifts. Two were already lined up to and one volunteered. Yay for that. It'd mean I'd get out of there on time and to bed on time, right?

Riiiiiiiight.

I ended up staying an hour and a half helping out ... more or less all over the place ... 'cause Unity was running like crap and Liberty had a situation and ... stuff. I get overtime for it, yes, it's just a bit ... annoying.

On the plus side, I did get to yell like an unreasonable person at 20-odd kids.

You know it's going to be a bad day at work when they call and tell you to bring your swords.

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.

Not a whole lot to talk about. I don't think that my last email to the church didn't get through because no one has contacted me AT ALL about being engaged. That's entirely out of character. So I'm going to send a follow-up sometime.

Other than that ... um ... I worked from 10:30 Friday night to 6:30 Saturday morning at Elmore, than from 7:00 Saturday morning to noon that day. I then slept from about 1:00 Saturday afternoon to 5:30 Sunday morning. I went to work at Kmart at 6:00 until 2:30 in the afternoon.

And now I'm staying up late-ish so I can sleep tomorrow between working at Kmart (start at 6:00am, I'll leave sometime around noon or one) and then at Elmore (10:30 at night until 6:30 the next morning).

This would be when you pity me.

Also, the latest episode of the Dresden Files was pretty good, but the show has just about NOTHING AT ALL to do with the books. Not that I wasn't expecting that. I'm betting that Evil Hat Productions will do a special supplement just to cover the differences.

Paula is the most wonderful, beautiful, sexy, lovely, sweet, kind, alluring and ... just about any great word you can think of ... goddess of a woman in the world. (None of youse guys or gals say anythin' to dispute this. Youse be takin' a short walk off a loong building if'n youse does, thanks to my pal Marty, alright?)

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.)

In case any of you haven't heard, I'm engaged to Sha. It's awesome. Unspeakably so.

I'm also almost done with training at Elmore Academy.

Not much else to cover. I'm alive!

Yay! I've started training at Elmore Academy! While I can't talk about any of the specifics that I know of, because it's just WRONG (and there's that NDA), I can talk about my general perceptions and all.

I think it fits me very well. I've never been in a job that just in the training I feel like "This is something that should be done. This is something that needs to be done. This is help that I can give. And I will." Unlike in retail where it's ... well ... not all that really important and the fun is really only in figuring out how to do things more effectively.

I haven't actually started yet. I've only been through my second day of training. But it seems to really fit me well.

And ... surprise, surprise ... I'm actually writing. Although less writing and more developing the world. Which is, if anyone remembers me mention it before, the Empire of Samir and the series concerning the fall of said Empire. It's the one where I come up with thaums as currency and magical guns. It's still far too simplistic, but it's getting better.

Other than that ... uh ... nothing much to cover. I'll have mo' money soon! Yay for better pay! For better work! With better hours! Woo!

As in, migratory worker, style of fing. (I'd give points for people getting the reference, but I know there are a bunch of people who'd get it. That would cause an inflation of FalarPoints (tm) in the economy, thereby devaluing them as opposed to any other kind of points. Hence, no points for you.)

Yay! I'm done working in Electronics in Kmart. Which I thought was going to be cool, but ended up not being at all. My last day in it was yesterday ... in which they "taught" me something new that I'm quite sure I got wrong and know I'll not use again. I don't understand them. I don't understand their style of teaching either. Retail has a problem with adequately training people.

Also! Don't make change out of money you don't have yet! Unless you put the stuff you changed with in the money you don't have yet! If you don't, you make Falar sad as he tries to find where the heck the money went.

In other news, new shoes, ties and pants. Now I'm all equipped for Elmore Academy. Because, yes, I am going to wear a tie to my first day at least and having ties is never a bad thing.

Um. Let's see. The weather is weird. Fog happens in the middle of the day. That's just ... bizarre. Fog is supposed to come in the morning, then burn off by midday, not spring out of nowhere on you!

Also being inspired to get back into writing, outlining, etc the Fall of an Empire series. My last notes are hideously short on whole plot angles that I know I brainstormed. I also found out that I did job opportunity pamphlets for wizards. This amuses me.