I know I don't usually blog about work, but this last week has been crazy-town.

<b>Saturday:</b> We have a new girl in the department. We'll call her Problem Child, as that is what she is - shows up late, impossible to get her to do anything, wanders off and talks to people in other departments for half her shifts. She spent the first fifteen minutes of her shift talking on her cellphone, and I, not having had a good day up to that point, was a bit short with her about how she needed to get her ass in gear. She flipped out, and the ensuing rant included the line 'Do you wanna take this out back? I'll take you on'. Seriously, who the hell says something like that?

<b>Monday:</b> A Murphy's Law of days - one opener calls in sick, Problem Child calls in 'too stressed out to work'. One of the afternoon people thinks she's closing, and comes in two hours late. The closer himself is forty-five minutes late. The tubing of our cooler system pops off, and sprays water all over the floor. I slice my hand open with a box cutter (not very deep or anything, but it was pretty annoying). It was a laugh-or-cry day - we mostly chose to laugh.

<b>Today:</b> Saturday's incident is firmly in the hands of the managers, and I got a promotion. Small one, with no real increase in power, but it's nice to know that the managers think that highly of me.

We'll see what new adventures tomorrow brings...

I think I'm going to end up being a dissenting and say I loved it. It's up there with the original three for me, and definately better than Temple of Doom (which I re-watched the other week, and then remembered <u>why</u> I had only seen it a few times - it's terrible). Loved the nods to all the previous films, and Harrison Ford, amazingly, has still got the touch.

Spoiler time!

Read More?

I bought the last two volumes of Transmetropolitan last week, and finally got around to reading them tonight. Awesome, as usual, and I have to give Warren Ellis mad props for pulling of an amazing ending. Endings are always tricky, and endings of serials exponentially so - this one was satisfying, conclusive, and not actually a total downer.

And it got me thinking - Transmet, on the surface, is a very cyberpunk comic. At it's core, though, it starts to transcend genre - it's a story about the power of words, and of The Truth. The Truth is not always good, and not always nice, but it's still something to strive for.

And coming in on a similar vein, an entry about <a href="http://copperbadge.livejournal.com/1621686.html">the reasons and nature of  blogging</a>. I find a lot of what Sam says there ringing true for me - I blog, both to share my news, opinions, and tirades with the world, and to keep a record for myself. That record is seven and a half years long now, and still chugging along. I know I've been negelectful, recently - some of it is a habit born out of last summer, I think, when I had very limited internet. I got in the habit of not posting, and never really broke it. Life has also become somewhat routine as of late, which has far less potential for interesting or amusing things to happen, particularly as I tend to forget them when they do - work, for example, is good for at least one nutbar customer a week, the current one being the woman who insisted that our Yukon Gold potatoes were in fact overgrown White Rose potatoes, and she knows this because she's a horticulturist, and grows potatoes and writes for magazines. I did a great deal of smiling and nodding.

But I'd really like to pick myself up out of my journaling slump, and maybe get some new graphics up eventually.

I know I haven't been posting much lately - pretty much all of my hypothetical posts would fall into two categories: 1) long introspective ramblings I'm too lazy to type up or 2) accounts of my daily doings, which can largely be summed up as 'same old, same old'. Still, I'll stick my head in and blather for a while, even though I really should be sleeping.

On the RPG front - I managed to actually get people organized for a Shadowrun 4 game I'm running. This is my first time GMing anything, so I'm really nervous, but I've got a great group of people - mix of SR4, SR3 and SR n00b players. We've managed to get through character generation, and the results are...interesting. I'll save that for another post, though, probably after we start having regular sessions. Earthdawn gets more tense every session - our Swordmaster escaped almost-certain death via NPC intervention, we set off alarms in the imperial dungeons, and now we're hiding out in a swampy ruined district in Vivane, helping a crazy old engineer try to dredge his failed flying machine out of the river.

I also bought the Wii version of Okami the other week, as I never got around to buying it for the PS2. It's absolutely gorgeous, and the controls are great - a little like Zelda as a Japanese fairytale. My only complaint thus far is there is a little too much NPC talking and not quite enough of me doing cool stuff. Also been playing Boom Blox, which proudly advertises itself as 'A Steven Spielberg Game', which makes me wonder if it was actually designed and/or produced by Spielberg, or merely endorsed by him. Either way, it's simplistic, but rather addictive - Jon and I played it for two hours straight tonight.

I know I'm going to regret how late I'm up tomorrow morning, but I couldn't sleep, and blogging is better than lying in bed awake. Term is over, most of my marks are back in - I did...well, crappily, to be honest, this term, although I didn't fail anything. My average is hovering on the the C+/B- line, which is a little disappointing, as it means most likely that I'll be denied admission to my first choice of major (cell bio specialization, which is full of cheating keener pre-meds), and will have to settle on general bio - I can take an almost identical course load, though. Of course, I could always wuss out and switch to Arts and get great marks, but while I love English (and get all As and B+s in it), I don't really want an English degree. Still, I really need to pull my shit together this fall - while UBC is actually a really tough school (Canadian students basically need an A+ average to get into my faculty), I'd like to have at least a solid B/B+.

In nerdy news, my little gnome mage in WoW hit 40 this week, which means I got my first mount ever - an <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=13322">Unpainted Mechanostrider</a>, which is really cool, although <a href="http://www.tokyo-tower.org/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=2447">kind of smokey</a>. I'm also running my first tabletop game ever - Shadowrun, for Rosie, Justin, and Jon. So far we have a Japanese elf technomancer, a troll <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_%28film%29">Predator</a> fanboy, and a social chameleon, who will probably be changed because the party doesn't have an actual mage. I'm nervous as hell, because I have no self-confidence, but I'm also pretty excited about sharing a setting I like so much with friends.

Had a brief end-of-term party which was actually more of a sit-around-and-talk-about-Shadowrun party, because those were the only people who actually showed. If I want to throw a party in the future, I think I need to first make more friends, and then invite three times as many people as I want to show on the principle that two thirds of them won't, as this is a re-occuring theme for me. Or possibly I should stop trying to have parties and sit around eating chips and playing video games by myself XD; Yeah, I'm a bitter antisocial freak. This is why I love Transmet - I want to be Spider when I grow up (well, okay, except female and not a journalist).

Speaking of video games, we have Brawl, and it is awesome. I have been pimping out Jon's Wii, as it is set up here on my 'new' big tv (36" CRT, hand-me-down but still in great shape) - I think I might cave and buy some virtual console stuff for it, possibly after I buy another GC controller and a GC memory card to play some Zelda with.