Hoo Boy do I suck at updating this thing!
I am so tired, like giant sponge tired. See, we went to this club this past Friday. I’m all like “Goth night at a gay club, I’m there!” I start sneezing uncontrollably after one too many inhales of the ole fog machine. The next day, it’s still going, except I have a headache. While I have my doubts as to if one can catch colds from fog machines, I’m pretty sure one can catch colds by being in the vicinity of drunk and sweaty people. The nose has calmed down a bit, but I’m stuck with this headache and some of the worst kind of fatigue.
How convenient, I suppose, that my temp job has slowed to nothing? I’m due to come back in at *some* point to fix something, and then there’s still hope of future projects, but it’s pretty sporadic, which is unfortunate for those of us who like paychecks. I’m trying to take advantage of my time off, at least. Last week that mostly involved too many cookies and a serious time investment into the long-forgotten Civ III. There were progress nuggets buried in there somewhere, though, mostly consisting of continued work on the Pak’ma’ra painting, plus some planning for the (hopefully) visionary new Salami Day site. We’ll see.
A chunk of Drew’s relatives came to visit last weekend, and left in their wake a vast array of uneaten Indian food. My new favorite thing is Korma. At this point, I’ve only had Lamb Korma, but I’m sure all of the other varieties are just as delightful. My Other New Favorite Thing is Bhakti chai, which I desperately need to write a tastyniblets post about at some point. It is everything chai should be and more. I apparently need to seek out a Natural Grocers where they sell Bhakti chai ice cream, it sounds incredibly magical.
So I really hate WYSIWYG editors. I need to find one that works for Drupal, though, as for some bizarre reason people who don’t know html really like them. I’m all like “learn html!” and they’re all like “no way!”. Sigh. I’ve crushed through the rather-generic one titled WYSIWYG, it looked messy and did little for me. Then I switched to WIZZYWIG, which I had high hopes for. Unfortunately, the admin panel was limiting, with poorly written textfields where the max size was far shorter than one needs. I poked the js to get around this, which was fine up until the point I realised I needed the ability to upload PDFs. On to CKeditor! Testing that out now, I’m hoping it’s the editor that will make all of my fantasies come true.
The State of Things
Boy am I sticky! I really shouldn’t be, since this is Colorado and it’s supposed to be super-dry, but sticky I am. My plan is to convince Drew to go swimming upon his waking up. Wish I had time to go tubing – it seems pretty big out here, what with all of these rivers out here that are really super-wide streams about 3 feet deep. Maybe one of these weekends.
Work is still super busy. Am slowly plowing through Job #2, and Job #1 has gotten a bit easier now that I’ve more or less figured out how to use a Mac, and how to use Codeigniter, and how to use all of the other stuff they have me using. It’s been educational – I’m still not sure how much longer this job will last, but when it ends I’ll have some good stuff to spruce up my resume & portfolio with.
On a completely unrelated note, all of the tank tops at Old Navy got stupid. I really like their ribbed tank tops – they’re comfortable and usually about $5-$7 each. However, at some point recently they decided to add a foot in length to them. I don’t see the point, I wear the shirt and have a giant pile of fabric bunched around my waist? So anyhow, I lost my tank top source, and need to find another one as my tank tops are slowly fraying apart!
Cow appreciation day last weekend was successful, we hit 4 different Chick-fil-as. The best one was in Larkridge, everyone was super excited, there were balloons everywhere and the employees seemed really into the event, and lots of customers were dressed up. We got our picture taken, too. The worst was some CFA in NE Denver (Brighton?), we drove through the middle of nowhere only to find unenthusiastic staff, very few people dressed up, and a few customers that snickered at our costumes. Not appropriate!
Just a quick update, mostly about work
I have no time for anything (except this brief post, apparently). Went on a 1.5 week trip, a vacation & funeral combo, to FL and VA and NC, got to see lots of people, make/eat lots of sushi, splish around in lots of water, and a good time was had by all.
My recruiter had an interview lined up for me when I got back, and it turned out that it was less of an interview and more of the guy having already decided he was interested in me based on my website, and just wanted to see if I was interested in the project. This still confirms in my head that I am bad at interviewing, since I didn’t really have an interview for this position. Also, there are other people working there who do both design and dev, so I was saved from the hated question of “which I like doing more”, which I think is only given by people who only do one or the other. Anyhow, it lasts a few weeks, since it’s just for a project, but assuming all goes well, it will make me more employable and give me money and all that good stuff.
I’m also in the middle of the DMS website (and by “in the middle” I mean, “busy hacking up Drupal and making a big ole mess”). Sometimes I’m uninspired for design, and I have that problem right now. So this is what I work on when I get home from the other job, since they want it done soon as well. I could also have a census job, the next round of followups, with training starting this Thursday, but I’m gonna have to call and cancel because I have no time. It’s like I went from famine to feast here. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, work is a good thing, it’s just exhausting when that’s all you do.
Also, this weekend I went to Drupalcamp Colorado, which was neat. I’ve got some fun ideas for new projects, once I have to time to get around to them, that is.
Pak’ma’ra, Netbook and Adventures
Headed out tomorrow morning at a vicious hour, and will arrive in Florida that afternoon. Tuesday, we’ll get to Richmond for a few days of wild excitement and sweating and hopefully AC, and then we head off to the Outer Banks for more sweating and excitement and AC. Might post, might not. My netbook is all happy with some 2GB RAM and a new 16GB hard drive, and I installed the Easy Peasy OS on it (partly because of the name!). I really want a Drupal development setup before I leave so I can get some work done while traveling, but my inexperience with Linux combined with Apache’s persnicketiness is leading me to suspect this may not happen. Which makes me a bit cranky. I’ll figure something out, I guess.
Also, have been working on my Pak’ma’ra painting, here is the progress thus far:
Kinda iffy on the curlicue clouds, and I really need a reference for those mountains. Aside from that, seems to be going well. I’ve got plans for metallic material in some areas, for bonus shiny. One thing that’s been annoying – turpentine stinks. I started to get a bad headache despite the open window and fan, and after gazing long and hard at the several paragraphs of health warnings in red on the turpentine container, I decided to switch to mineral spirits. Except that I made the mistake of getting super-green enviro-friendly mineral spirits, thinking it would be the opposite of headaches and brain damage. Which it is, but it’s a cloudy white rather then clear, and keeps separating from the linseed oil, which sucks. I may have to switch to regular mineral spirits. Anyhow, it’s been pretty fun to work on, maybe I’ll do more Pak’ma’ra art after this one, too.
Upcoming Adventures + Babylon 5
I’m apparently going to be traveling a bit coming up soon, meaning that it’s a very good thing that I’ve got a giant stack of free travel courtesy of Airtran. This Friday, we’re headed for Florida for Drew’s other grandfather’s funeral (we went to Drew’s first grandfather’s funeral 2 months ago, and then 2 months before that Drew wen’t to Neil’s funeral, so it has not been a good year for Drew so far=\). The current plan is that, on the next Tuesday, we head to Richmond, and stay there until Saturday when we leave with his Dad & co. to go to the Outer Banks where they’re rented a house for a week. We stay there a few days, then head back to Denver. However, it seems I might be needed out in California for family-related purposes at an unknown point in the future, and so I’m hesitant about scheduling all of this flight time. Helps to have the travel vouchers and all, at least. I do like traveling by planes, which helps.
So I ordered a bunch of laptop parts, I’m gonna upgrade my netbook’s RAM and hard drive, and then try installing Ubuntu on it. See, it’s becoming a hindrance that I’m trying to do all of this stuff with php and Drupal and am doing it off of my Windows XP computer. I haven’t used Linux much at all, but apparently it’s much easier to do backend web programming with it then with a Windows box, and it’s time I figured out how to do that. Assuming I figure it out in the next 4 days and get the netbook set up, I’ll have a teeny workstation to use while traveling to work on the Drupal site I recently started.
So I’m almost done watching Babylon 5 – we’ve got a few episodes left, and maybe a movie. I totally caved and ordered figures, which arrived today. They’re certainly not action figures, being that Sheridan is the only one where you can move both the arms and the legs, but they’re still cute. I’ve also got Delenn, G’kar, and Londo. Now I just need to figure out how to get the rest of the figures that I want via finding the internet sellers that are trying to unload them for cheap, rather then the sellers that think they’re super valuable and are pricing them accordingly. I found someone selling Ivanova and Vir for not too much, so they might be my next order. I can substitute some of my pre-existing figures for other characters. Aragorn makes an excellent Marcus (though I might still get a Marcus character if I see him), and Legolas makes an excellent Number 1. Honestly, I never liked Number 1, I kept thinking of her as “Mars Resistance Leader Hannah Montana.”
Season 5 hasn’t been quite as exciting as Season 4, but Drew warned me of that. All of the Londo/G’kar stuff has been excellent, at least. I didn’t care for the telepaths, and they took up most of the first half of the season. I also think there’s been a huge hole where Ivanova used to be, she was a great character and I don’t think Lochley was a good replacement. As much as I liked Delenn, her character stopped being as interesting once her and Sheridan became official, which happened around the same time the Minbari caste conflict ended as well.
It’s been a bit exhausting watching through so many seasons of something, so it’s good timing that we’re finishing up right before we leave, since I could use a TV break!
Wheels Within Wheels
My bike has a flat tire. The last time my bike had a flat tire, I spent an hour wrangling with it, getting saturated with dirt and grease, only to have the inner-tube not on correctly and need to go to the shop to get it redone anyhow. That was the back tire though, the one intertwined with all of the gears and such. The tire that is currently flat is the front tire. Given that it’s a simple procedure to get the tire off, I’m going to give it a go again, since I’ve got a spare tube and all. Hopefully it works. Even if I am successful, I think I’ll still take my bike to a shop the next time the back tire goes kaput, as a shop has much better equipment to deal with a persnickety back wheel then I do.
I’m going through a slight conundrum with my car. See, I just took it in for it’s 90K checkup, and spent a buttload of dollars getting it fixed up. Which I’d expected. The thing is, I really liked the shop I went to. It’s an oil change and car repair shop that also has a coffee house attached. While I sat and waited for my car, I down two different types of chai tea, one of them on the house due to my really long wait. The one I actually paid for was some of the best chai tea I’ve ever had. So, this shop has an oil change deal where, for $99 you can buy 4 oil changes + 4 drinks. The problem is, I’ve got my own ramps, and my own pan. I’ve been changing my own oil for several years now. It saves me money. But then again, it’s not like it saves me a huge amount of money. And it was also a huge pain to change oil in the winter, given that the parking lot was perpetually covered in wet slush most of the time. And I live in an apartment, so it’s also a pain just storing the oil changing materials (especially since I lack a balcony or backyard). In any case, I’m currently debating selling my oil changing stuff and just going to this shop. If I do this, I might hold off until the weather gets crappy again, since changing your oil in the summer is no biggie. That slush last winter sure was awful to lie in, though!
The Census, Bras, Too Much TV, and Insane Colorado Weather
The Census hasn’t changed much as the last time I wrote. Or rather, things change constantly, but in minor ways and at a pretty constant rate. Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking to two people who a.) refused to answer some information and were b.) polite and respectful. I was getting afraid that either people would be polite and respectful, or would refuse information and be rather cranky about it, as that has more or less been my experience up to recently. I guess it makes me feel a little happier with humanity knowing that there are people who don’t agree with everything the Census is doing, but don’t feel like they need to take out their negative emotions about it on me.
So a little more then a month ago, I got back on the Pill. I just have some severe pain issues I’m dealing with, and as it’s been about 8 years since I’ve taken hormones, I’ve been hoping that some of the problems I had with it then would not be a problem now. Seems OK so far, and has helped with pain a bit, though not as much as I’ve been hoping admittedly, but in time hopefully that will improve. The only side effect I’ve really been noticing this time around is that whole “breast size increasing” thing. It got pretty drastic just before my period, then calmed down a bit, but I’m still at a point where I can’t wear some of my smaller bras, and I think it’s just going to stay like this. Losing weight isn’t an option – if I were meant to be any smaller, it would have happened back when I was dancing outside for 12-16 hours a week at Liberty. In any case, my BMI is quite normal and I eat my veggies and all that, so weight loss just to get into some bras seems a bit dumb. Thus, time to buy some new bras. Which is a pain, as I’m lucky to get bras as cheap as $40-$50 apiece because your standard American bra manufacturers don’t feel the need to manufacture bra sizes outside of the median range. British bras are much better with this, but they don’t exactly run cheap. So, time to scour the internet searching for deals.
One reason that I can get through some of the more unfortunate/stressful parts of being an enumerator is because I am currently obsessed with Babylon 5. We just started watching Season 4, and all I can think about all day is what’s gonna happen to all the poor Narns? And is the Captain OK? And why did Vir lose all that weight anyhow? Last Sunday we watched 9 episodes in a row, it was insane. I need to stretch this out more, because my mind is waay too absorbed in this TV show. I remember the crash I experienced after watching Seasons 1-3 of The Office in about a 3 day timespan, and I think the post Babylon 5 crash will be much worse then that. It’s an amazing show, though, and I wish more TV programs were written this thoughtfully.
Oh, and we’re supposed to get up to 4 inches of snow here tonight. In the middle of May. Yup, apparently Colorado springs are completely insane. Rumor has it that Richmond is sweating to death on and off in the 90s these days. I, uh, think I prefer the random snow. I really like how out here, even when it is really hot out, it’s not dripping. If anything, you have to keep drinking lots of water because of the dryness. “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” always seemed like a dumb phrase, but it seems to be true. Well, to an extent, as I’m sure anyone living in Southern Arizona or New Mexico or Texas in July might disagree with me.
My Adventures as a Census Enumerator
So last Monday, April 26th, I started the enumerator job. The first week was all training. I hear my group lucked out – our training was held in a county administrative building, the room we used was bright and comfortable and quite reminiscent of a few classrooms I had Comp Sci classes in back at VCU. There was a cafeteria in the basement with reasonable prices, and an area outside to sit and eat said lunch while admiring some very nice foothills.
The training lasted four days, and mostly consisted of learning how to fill out the mounds of forms that are a supplement to any federal job, plus sorting through the piles of confusion. We started off with one crew leader and two assistants. As of Day 2, one of the assistants was assigned somewhere else, and as of Day 5 the other was assigned somewhere else, and we are assigned a second Crew Leader. So two people in our training class get promoted to Crew Leader Assistant. And then, as of yesterday, our original Crew Leader leaves as well. Aside from the shifting of peoples, there also seems to be general disagreement on how to fill out various persnickety forms, as well as disagreement on how to accurately obtain the census data itself. The first several days, we operated under the idea that you tried to do it as to-the-letter as possible, down to the “Are you male or female?” question on the form. Then, a higher-up comes in to give us a chat, and essentially sweeps all of this away, suggesting that we guesstimate a range of things based on what see see looking inside someones door (assuming that the persona at the door is refusing answers, at least). Thus far, my strategy is to operate somewhere in the middle.
So I’ve been doing the actual door-to-door for about a week now. The job is a mixture of enjoyable, tedious, and “making me want to quit” awful. The last part, luckily, has been a minority of the time, thus far.
The Enjoyable: It’s been beautiful outside lately, and it’s kind of nice to have a job that gets me out in this spring weather. My first day working, I was in a neighborhood beside a foothill with a path, so I took the opportunity to hike up it during my lunch break. I saw several species of bird I’m not sure I’ve seen before, along with gorgeous views of the Front Range as well as an interesting perspective of the nearby Coors factory.
It’s also pleasant to talk to pleasant people. People have various reasons for not having mailed in their census forms, the more common being “I forgot” or “I didn’t get one” or “I didn’t know what to put for ______”. People are often apologetic about this, and happy that, since I’m at their door and filling out everything for them, it’s one less form they have to do. Though I have not run into the mythical person that offers cake and/or dinner, I have had several people ask if I wanted to come inside and sit down. Alas, the job forbids me from doing this, but it’s a nice gesture nonetheless.
The Tedious: First off, we meet in some really strange places. It seems the classroom we were using is not available anymore, but we still need to have team meetings every day. Despite whatever stories about Census waste that are floating around say, there certainly isn’t money to spend on meeting spaces. So we’ve met twice in Denny’s. After realizing that a.) curious customers/wait-staff are not good to have around when you have work to do involving private information, and b.) we were occupying the majority of some poor waitress’s section, we’ve moved on to meeting in the lobby of a county building, and will continue to meet in that less the ideal space until a local college lets out and we can take up residence in their library.
Also tedious is the forms. So many forms! However, I get paid for filling out said forms, and the more I do the forms the easier they get, so this isn’t really a big deal.
The big tedious bit is finding some of these people. See, my job is to count the number of people in a given residence on April 1st. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. First, I’ve got to actually catch the people at home. If they’re not at home, I leave a slip of paper on their door with my number on it. Hardly anyone calls. I stop by at all different times of the day, but as I’m only allowed to go to doors until 7:00 pm, there’s gonna be some people I’ll just never catch in person. If that’s the case, I need to find a proxy – usually a neighbor or an apartment manager. It can be a bit of a pain to find these people too, and to convince them to answer questions. Which leads to…
The “Making Me Want To Quit” Awful: The Census is something that people are legally required to do. The information is mostly used to make sure communities get the money they need for schools, roads, etc.. Aside from that, it’s used for statistical purposes. The IRS will never see the information, nor will US Immigration Services. However, some people are fearful for their privacy. The minimal information I need to get is, well, pretty minimal – the number of people staying at a residence, their gender, and age. Anything beyond that is a bonus, and if people are uncomfortable giving any piece of information, they can just tell me so and I will skip that question.
Unfortunately, some people do not seem aware of any of the information in the preceding paragraph. I had a person who called me, yelling about privacy violations and the illegality of what I was doing and how this is harassment. She insulted me, left me feeling quite harassed, and I dealt with it by crying in my car for the next 20 minutes and then drowning my misery in Burger King. I was seriously ready to quit after this. Yesterday someone slammed a door in my face – not nearly as bad as getting yelled at, but it still stung.
Maybe part of the problem is me – the last “customer service” style job I’ve held was Food Lion, and I didn’t interact with customers much beyond “How thin do you want your ham sliced?” Since then, the only customers I’ve had to deal with are web design clients – sometimes a pain in their own way but generally with problems that I have some power of fixing. With this job, though, there are people that are angry because they perceive me as the Government trying to invade their space. They want to vent their anger, and I’m a nice soft target. And while logically I can understand that it’s the badge I wear that they’re angry at, it still hurts to be treated this way.
It’s a definite minority at least – most people are at least compliant, even if not totally friendly. But, it still stresses me out and I have to fight off thoughts of “What am I doing wrong to make them so angry and why can’t I fix it?” Things like this simply reaffirm that I’m designed to work better with computers then with people.
The team I work with is really nice, though, and my various leaders are supportive. If nothing else, the job pays well, is flexible, and will be over in about 2 months or so anyway.
