I'm the only gainfully employed member of my family...how strange!

Sorry I haven't posted in a while... I forgot how much this working for a living sucks! But I must try to stick it out as I need the cash for school, and I also found out today that I am officially the only member of my family gainfully employed. My darling bro told his boss to stick it today and therefore has put himself out of work. Little bro has always been a little flammatory (ok, so he's easily ignited, but really, once the fire has started, who cares right?), but there is usually a problem that causes my angry siblings' explosions. Well, we'll have to see what happens there...He's coming out tomorrow for a visit, I think.

On another note, my work has been going reasonably well. My language skills however, are beginning to suffer greatly from the constant cursing, yelling and generally demonstrable behavior of the owner and the customers. The other thing is that everything is so loud there, that I am seriously considering wearing earplugs to keep me from going crazy. Is it really necessary to have all the phones ringing on their loudest setting, while the radios are also on high volume? There's also the loud dot matrix invoice printers that I sit beside all day. I tell ya, between my exceptionally sensitive hearing and my ADD, this place is enough to drive me to the nut house and back again!

School is not going so well...as usual I've set superhuman goals for myself and you know what? I didn't meet them- imagine that! I seem to enjoy setting myself up to fail (or at least to seriously flounder). I've got to get back on track. At least the crappy weather around here lately has kept my mind off of the great outdoors (aka gardening).

I've also taken on another project, also this one takes very little time and I thoroughly enjoy myself. I'm play a role in an audio podcast written by a couple of talented local writers. They are friends of my Angry Sibling, whom I had heard of and contacted for an 'audition'. I expected nothing going in except a chance to see how they do things, but I ended up with a leading role! I was as shocked as anyone, well except for Angry Sib who had no idea I'd even tried out, let alone had any interest in this sort of thing. In the first script, I had a terribly demanding role that consumed hours of time...my characters' dialogue was "SHIT"! Yes, that was all my character said, one "SHIT". Boy, that was a hard one to master. I'll write more later once I've asked for permission to link to their site.

How I get my shopping fix without breaking the bank.

I'll admit that I like to spend money. I enjoy the thrill of the purchase more than the actual product itself at times. When I was making good coin, I rarely watched what I spent on things. Now that I'm a starving student, I have to pay much more attention to the money I spend. The problem is that I still crave the shopping! Well, today I got my fix at Superstore, and this is what I got...

Not bad for $0.44 eh? I think it's fun-but MH is likely to thieve it from me when she sees it. At that price-even the House Spouse has nothing to gripe about!
Anyway I'd better get back to studying before I get any farther behind than I already am!

What I shouldn't have been doing today...

So this is roughly what are backyard looks like, although I have started a perennail garden roughly where the mound of dead grass is. I should have spent my time studying today but instead I spent about 5 hours figuring out what perennials I have,what I don't have and what I want as wellas a rough map of the area (14'x18'). I also managed to rake a large portion of the back, and I also set up a make-shift cold frame.The problem is now that I've started to putter, the harder it is to stop! The picture below is what I would like the yard to look like.

Yes, I know- this is a pipe dream, but hey, you've got to start somewhere! This is only part of a friends' garden that I would love to transplant to our place. I took this picture last July - is this place gorgeous or what!

Today, technology was NOT my friend.

Today was my second day on the job (1st day with the owner present), and the computer I was using crashed 5 times. The owner thought it was because I was doing something wrong--(I can be stubborn and spacey, but I'm certainly not slow). I basically spent the entire day trying to enter parts into the system, over and over, because every time the computer crashed, I lost all of my work! By the end of the day I was afraid to touch the damn thing because I knew it was making me look like a complete moron. The tech guy said it wasn't something I did because there were no error codes, and the system works fine on his end, even though it appeared to be locked up on our end. I hope it acts up for the owner this evening so he can see that it really wasn't me! At least I don't work again until Wednesday, so I can hopefully get over my computer-phobia.