On West Egg

GUESS WHAT, Y'ALL.

No really, guess.




Have you guessed yet? No? I guess I'll give you more time.




Oh, well now that's not terribly kind. But I guess it counts as a guess.

Well you're wrong. IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! I am now a quarter of a century old. It was a pretty uneventful day, though. I worked both my jobs, which didn't really leave time to do anything much else (I've been working part time at a college bookstore during their rush on top of full-time at my regular workplace, btw).

Oh, and I work eight hours tomorrow.

BUT THEN TWO DAYS COMPLETELY OFF FUCK YEAH. :DD

In other news, I have moved across town from the two-bedroom apartment I'd been in to a room in a townhouse that I moved into July 30th and has only juuust stabilized as far as residents overall go. (OMG SOON THE KITCHEN CABINETS WILL MAKE SENSE AND IT WILL BE GLORIOUS.)

So, my rent is up but it includes cable and heat and electric and internet and water and and and, so my bills are actually down. Working 40 hours a week (up from the 38 I had before getting the new position mid-July) has given a slight-but-noticeable increase to my income, and when I officially get the position in payroll, I'll be getting about $1.50/hr more, plus benefits.

OH HEY I FINISHED THAT PAPERWORK TODAY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY ME.

Also, last week the super uncompetent manager got fired, and while the new one is young and over ambitious and kind of on the fast-track to burnout (AND TOTALLY NOT KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT VENDORS AT ALL OMG, though he does at least outwardly acknowledge that I know what I'm talking about and if I say "don't do that again because" he probably won't do it again), his lofty goals are at least good goals, and he's still probably going to be better than the old one after burning out.

OH AND HEY. After like one-and-a-quarter years I have finally stopped being and Ohio licensed driver and got my PA one, and transferred the title and got a new insurance policy and everything.(Oh and I registered to vote, which I have been FAILBOT at for a while. Uh.)

I live here. With growing savings.

And I can probably go off food stamps soon! (Should, even. THAT IS MY GOAL FOR NEXT WEEK.)

(I set goals and follow through now. Soon there may even be lists. Because I'm a MOTHERFUCKING ADULT WTF.)

Oh hey, two days off. Maybe I'll finally get caught up on my currently releasing toku (well, the old stuff. I watch the weeklies and will miss OOO dreadfully) so that I can get back to the completed series I was in the middle of and last watched/live-tweeted at least like two months ago?

Or I could finish PONIES. They are starting up again soon...

(Also at some point over those days I intend to finish the scene where [redacted] from the ridiculous powerless HS AU Samurai fic I haven't worked on at all since starting. Maybe this time I won't get distracted by the internet.)

Sorry, you guys I just have SO MUCH to catch you up on.

...OH YEAH. I got (hopefully the last time ever) texted out of nowhere by Awful Ex about how he's so glad I'm still in this town and how he hopes I succeed at life and blah blah blah "I'm still in love with you."

I have two exes. How many "I'm still in love with you" messages have I gotten? TWO. WHAT THE HELL. :| At least Awful didn't wait THREE YEARS to send that one.

Also, he says he's deleted my number but AHAHAHAH EXPECTING HIM NOT TO LIE.

Oh, and he tried a "remember me by the good times" thing except the "good times" he chose were A)after he broke up with me B)a thing he was doing on his own that just happened in the same room I was in sometimes, and C)was a series he was marathoning six seasons of with the tv set loud enough that I couldn't sleep well. GOOD TIMES, MAN.

And then he misspelled my name. (And, correcting for spelling, used my birth name and not the one I go by, which is just a dick move.) (For those wondering, he didn't misgender me, I just... don't go by my birth name much anymore. It was still totally disrespectful and dismissive of my wishes, but there wasn't dysphoria or anything triggery. Just what would have been major annoyance if I had any fucks to give about him anymore.)

I think that's everything but IDK.

tl;dr: Life has been steadily improving. With health care in three months! \o/

(I've been sitting here going "why is that plane taking like 20 minutes to fly past?" before it went click and the sound changed and I realized it was the dishwasher in the apartment above me.)

( In other news, MONEY MONEY MONEY )

I've written a bunch of things. Enough things, at this point, that I feel like a fic master list isn't a waste of time. (Well, it might have been a waste of some of the ridiculous amount of time it took to put together. WHY DID I NOT RATE THAT LONG STORY WAY BACK WHEN. I HAD TO READ THE WHOLE THING. GOD.)

Anyway, the list is here. There might be something on it that you never knew I wrote! (Especially since there's a fic from 2006 - my first fic ever, and only fic for A VERY LONG TIME.)

JSYK.

Winter Adventure:

So I went to mail my municipality tax form in (I don't get a refund since I only had an extra cent come out of my pay ;_; ), and oh hey it's snowing. Cool. In fact, I can feel the snow landing on me even though there's no wind, because it's clumping. On the way back to my building (There's no way to indicate that mail in my mailbox is outgoing, not old, so I walked out to the mailbox out by the bus stop to drop it in), the snow is clumping even MORE. It was glorious. My footprints on the way out were already snowed over.

Kitchen Adventure:

I decided to make some butter chicken from the paste my parents got me as part of their FOOD FOR CHRISTMAS :DDDD gift. I didn't realize until I was cutting it up that I'd gotten thin-sliced chicken breasts, so I've got slices of chicken more than pieces. Oh, and this particular brand has the vaguest directions I've ever seen on a product that didn't involve translation issues. It's simmering right now, and the apartment smells awesome, so it'll probably turn out fine, but IT MIGHT NOT OH GOD.

At least I know the rice will come out of the rice cooker fine.

ETA: SUCCESS! OM NOM NOM. Plus, I am so awesome that about half a second after the timer for the chicken went off, my rice cooker clicked over to keep-it-warm mode.

So today was The Day of Presents. It was a good one, because MONEY AND FOOD. In more detail:

-Money from grandparents
-Money from parents
-Borders gift card from my little brother
-FOODS (A couple curry pastes for chicken, a couple kits for Asian dinners, and Thai curried rice that, if it turns out as shit as the curried pasta my dining hall once served, I didn't pay for
-The traditional underwear from the parents
-Infinite Jest
-Money from my older brother and sister-in-law
-A towel/washcloth set. :|

So yeah. MONEY AND FOODS. Pretty sure I'm going to be checking ALL THE STORES around here to see if they have early-release Samurai Zords. Even if the Bandai of America ones are stupid and lack emblem mode. (Zord spoilers: I would wonder how Pink and Yellow are going to attach to the final combination, but BoA has changed-for-the-better how the first set of aux zords attach to the Megazord individually, so if they don't have their PASTEDE ON YAY status in the BoA toy version, I won't complain.)

I totally didn't realize how insanely depressing my life should have been lately until I typed all that out. I don't care, though, because I wasn't depressed during, and I've no reason to be depressed now.

Anyway, I now have all the furniture in place (except for figuring out what the hell to do with CJ's twin-mattress-onna-twin-mattress ('cause he didn't have a box frame) and the TV, TV stand, and the couple other random things on it (probably gonna shove it all to the bedroom wall and ignore it). Now all that's left is sorting through all the shit that's going onto the shelves of the shelved furniture and so on and figure out where it all goes. I can do that tomorrow.

Major stuff, short version: Job, breakup, paycut for ex=found a third roommate.

Major stuff, long version: Got a job working nights at the grocery that's like 5 minutes' walk from the apartment. Spent two day shifts learning cashier since they want all of their night people knowing how just in case, which was good because after about a week and a half of night shifts, one of the night cashiers got himself fired for laziness. Before that I was working as a stocker, which left me way sore after the first shift because EIGHT HOURS OF MOVING BOXES, but since then I've been fine. Night cashier is SO GODDAMN BORING, though. And I'm not allowed to read or have music while cashiering either. I get to music while stocking, though. And I make a dollar more per hour for any hours that are on a Sunday. I have no clue why, but it's nice.

CJ and I kind of unintentionally used each other to get out of Sandusky and once that happened I guess we unconsciously stopped working so hard to work out issues? I'm not sure, but after patching things up before that last post, things just got BAD. So we broke up like threeish weeks ago, I got the spare room and we moved the cats in with CJ. It worked fairly well.

Then like a week and a half later he and the head baker at the place that was the whole reason we moved here had personality conflicts enough that the owner was all "seriously you guys can't work together" so now CJ is a cake decorator at the same grocery store I work at. He's gone from salaried + benefits to hourly and none, so rent became OMG MOST OF WHAT WE MAKE, so we decided that a roommate was in our best interests.

The upshot: rent is manageable again, I've seen the guy like three times, once was when we met with him to see if we'd all work as roommates, and I'm sharing a room with my ex. This is... interesting.

But hey, the town is fucking awesome, I'm slowly saving up some money, and I just signed up for ranger_bingo over on Dreamwidth, so I'll have a boatload of prompts up and will hopefully get in the habit of writing once I get the card.

I'm amused. According to my LJ Statistics page, which tracks the most recent 100 logged-in visitors for your last 30 days, I had one person reading something here on the 5th, three on the 13th, and then 77 logged-in LJers have been to my journal since that fic went up. I know at least one has been a repeat visitor, and I've got at least one more bump coming when the story gets linked in the next spandex_report.

Of course, I'd probably have more visitors if I wrote something every now and again, yeah? But that's silly talk.

In matters of actual import, I really like the apartment (all we've got left are like a couple mid-size boxes of CJ's stuff in the bedroom, and a handful of things that are waiting for shelves to go up out of the cats' reach in the living room. (Okay, out of one of the cats' reach. Athena can't even get up on the futon, because she is like the definition of a Fat Cat. Hades is, unsurprisingly, exceptionally evil, even for a cat.)

We've got a few other items we'd like to get, too. We're going to be getting a DVD/VHS combi, because even though the market no longer has a place for them we, like many other people, don't feel like buying the movies we already have on VHS again. Plus, my high school band state competition performace recordings are on VHS, and I'd like to show those to CJ someday.

We also need colored tape or spray paint for the dining room chairs we picked up, because the gold really stands out in the apartment, and we unintentionally picked up a suble 5-color rainbow theme to the apartment, and the chairs have five bars running up the back.

Also, we discovered that if you tell a designer that they have 5 colors with which to make a rainbow, they always throw out orange. Always. It's like the most mundane conspiracy ever.

I still haven't found a job because, well, college town in the summer. Almost nobody is hiring. Don't mind looking, because we're about 2 miles and lots of hill away from the main commercial area by campus, so I'm getting exercise again. Plus, I got HeartGold, so I get a ton of Watts in the Pokewalker.

There've been some rough moments, because High Stress + Preexisting Issues = Yelling between CJ and I, but we've worked things out (at least for now), which is always nice.

We're having a belated housewarming party (because we're going to need the funds to throw a party first and, um, we don't right now) in mid-July. If any of you on my flist think you can make it to Mid-Pennsylvania on a Saturday, you're more than welcome to get in touch with me and try to come, but I understand that y'all likely can't.

Did I miss anything? I dunno. Ask me stuff!