MrChupon was right when he said the moment of kindness and sympathy shown by my boss was a rare one. Rather, she'd be a kind and sympathetic person if she could, but she has to uphold the terrifyingly beaurocratic policies of the corporate machine, for which I do not blame her at all. However, on arriving at work today and finding myself in the doghouse that I'd been promised I wouldn't be in yesterday I stopped caring whether it was my immediate supervisor's fault (it was not) or the HR department's fault (it might have been) or the fault of the company as a whole (it probably was). Having given things the thought I did yesterday I knew exactly how much money I had to work with, exactly how long I could live without an income, and exactly the amount of my prospective tax return if I absolutely have to use it to live on instead of buying my new computer with it. Armed with this information I quitted.

I am now in a frantic pause in the rewriting of my resume and the hunt for all the scattered references, everyone I ever knew who liked me. I'm applying for some jobs in schools. At best I'll get like an aide or tech job until the end of the school year, at least I could substitute teach. Just gotta get some income.

Quitting my job without lining something else up first was probably not the smartest idea I have ever had. However, out of all the things I have done lately, it felt the best.

In other news, the shelf in my kitchen where I kept all my mugs and glasses came crashing down last night, spraying my bare feet with glass shards. Ouch! :(

With my job. I called my boss in tears this morning. My car had gotten stuck (yet again) in a massive pile of snow and there was not a single solitary prayer that I'd be able to get it out in time to arrive in a timely fashion for work. Tears, tears, try to imagine this. I lost my temper, I told her exactly how frustrated and stressed I am, how very unhappy I have been, how the only reason I've been hanging on to that job is because I am desperately trying to make it through until I can get back into school this fall. Then I told her I wasn't coming back, like ever.

Then, miraculously, she told me not to make snap decisions, that I should take the day off and think about things and that when I go back tomorrow they'll have a chat with HR and see if there isn't anything they can do to make me stay. Then if I still wanted to quit at least I could work a notice period.

So I'm home, paying an ungodly amount of money for new tires and a four wheel alignment, and doing my fafsa. I predict done with tmobile in a month or less.

I bought this game the day it launched. I didn't even peel off the cellophane until a week or so ago, and this for a game I'd been drooling over since it was still being referred to as Trusty Bell. But I'd promised myself I wouldn't play it until I finished FFXII, and what with one thing or another I just now started it. So needless to say I was very excited to get started.

The opening video was pretty, had already seen a lot of it, but I was impressed with the style, the bright colors and the fact that I had the option to play the game with the Japanese audio. I'm kind of a completist, and I like to have things in their original settings (I like classic rock a lot, I buy as much of it on vinyl as possible for this very reason), so the Japanese was a nice touch. The combat tutorials were easy enough to follow and since the hybrid turn-based time-limited system is a little unusual it was good to have a walkthrough of how things were going to work. The subtitles are a little on the small side, forcing me to pull my chair uncomfortably close to the tv to read them, but that's a minor squabble.

Into the game proper now, and for a while things are ok. Given a chance to get used to the fairly high production values, the novelty of a Japanese-speaking game, and the usual handholding at the beginning of an RPG, things start to feel very familiar. Too familiar. Archaic in fact. Maybe I've gotten spoiled on the Final Fantasies and KOTORs I've been playing... Maybe I'm too used to modern inventions like character customization and I don't know, options, but I get kinda bored nowadays if I don't have them. I mean, I don't need a full-blown custom character a la Mass Effect or Oblivion, but give me something to work with, give me something like the License Board, or let me allocate skill points at level up or something. For crying out loud, Puzzle Quest let me choose a class and assign my skill points, and it's only half an RPG!

Oh wait, there is some customization. I can choose which special moves I take into battle with me. I've got one for light areas and one for shadow. Two moves you can take. And sometimes when you level up, you learn a new move. So you can choose to replace the one you already have, or keep the one you already have, or even switch out for one you learned previously. Ooh, choices choices.

Which brings me to another point. A turn based game in which you can A) attack, B) special attack, or C) use item is not very interesting. You have one special attack equipped for when in light areas, one special attack for when you're in dark areas, and one regular attack. So at any given time you can do one of exactly three things. Fuuuuun.

At one point I'd have been reeling over the atmosphere of the game, its many things to do and collect, its slightly bizarre and intriguing choice of subject matter. At this point, however, I can't imagine playing all the way through this for anything but the achievement points (of which I have hardly any and desperately want more). The story is bizarre and intriguing, sure, but I don't have to know how it ends badly enough to grind through the tedium of all that's still left between me and the finale. I've finished the first chapter of the game. I don't know if I'll play anymore at this point.

My job is driving me bananas. My apartment is small, cold, and very very far away from everything. My daily commute is a health hazard. And I'm broke.

But.

I have a plan.

When I get back to my small cold dirty apartment, there should be a wonderful little piece of paper there known as a W2, which will enable me to file my taxes. Filing my taxes will enable me to file my FAFSA. Filing a FAFSA will enable me to apply to grad school. Getting accepted to grad school (please, god!) will allow me to quit my job. And hopefully find another job later where they don't preschedule all my bathroom breaks. I'm not five.

My brother has been staying here for three weeks on his christmas break from college. I like having him, it's great fun. We play games (even non-electronic ones, who knew I still remembered how to do that?), and we trade books, and we cook outrageously unhealthy things just about daily, and when we don't feel like cooking anything we buy outrageously unhealthy ready made things and eat those instead. However, I am about ready to trade in my current pigsty for a proper set of rooms again. Wade's going back to college on Sunday night and I intend to use this opportunity to clean EVERYTHING.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, I'll have to find a place to accomodate my newest resident. That's right, new resident. My mother is getting rid of her dogs left and right after a new puppy breeding law took effect here in Maine. [long aside: This law says every person who sells more than one puppy or kitten in a year must register as a vendor. Not bad except for the expiration date. You have to reregister every sixty days and there is a fee each time. Yikes. That's six fees to the government per year. At least one fee per litter. And that's if you don't register until the day you're ready to sell them. A puppy takes way longer than sixty days from point of conception until it can be sold. Not entirely unreasonable in concept, but still who can blame breeders if they want to get out? /long aside] So in response, my mother who overreacts to just about everything is giving away all her dogs but two. Due to this de-dachshunding of the parents house, my brother's favorite and best dog, Boomer, was on the chopping block. So he's temporarily relocated to my place while my mother gets over this newest of her overreactions. She always gets over them, but with pets and things it's usually too late to undo when she does get over it.

So here Boomy is and here he stays, until either my mom's ready to take him back, Wade gets a place of his own, or until such time as I can no longer keep him. He's a good dog. Oh and did I mention he's Daltrey's dad? He isDaltrey's dad.

Daltrey's in the back, Boomer in the front. Clever photography renders most of the chaos invisible... aka, I shoved stuff out of the way before taking it. :P

Current New PC fund balance: $300.00 and expecting boost in form of birthday gift cards later this weekend.

I understand the back-compatibility issues involved with playing an original Xbox game on my 360... well, alright, I don't understand them, but I understand enough to realize that issues exist and that it isn't entirely unreasonable for Microsoft to ask me to do the occasional update to these games to make them run slightly better.

However.

The latest update I was required to do to KOTOR II seems to have bunged the game up to the point where I literallycan't play it anymore. All the text is garbled gibberish, and I mean all of it, from the opening screen-- which now lists partial descriptions of several weapons (I think one is a stun baton, the others are so fragmentary that all I know is that one is upgradeable), to the descriptions of the areas you're about to enter (one says "Cut scene" ummm....) to the conversation options. Conversation options are pretty pivotal in that game, and if my options say things like "Kfoialkne_pc_238472" I'm going to have a very hard time making appropriate responses. I did try to guess my way through one conversation and got trapped into replaying the pazaak tutorial. Yay. To make matters worse, the next time I ranblindly intocombat (distant enemy so small as to be inidentifiable, labeled "uranDuros") I never did get to find out what I was fighting because the game froze completely to the point where I had to get up and restart the whole console to get out of it.

Sweet update.

I want the old version back.

In the last forty eight hours, my car has been towed on a chain three times. That's THREE separate occasions when the snow has been so deep, thick, slippery, and downright dastardly that my car has been unable to go someplace under its own power and has needed to be literally dragged there behind a truck.

Two of those times have been into my own driveway.

In the last two days we have gotten about a foot of snow, and it is still coming down. (Will it never end?) I missed work entirely on Monday due to heading directly into a ditch (the first of the chain-hauling occasions) within four miles of my house, then I don't know how well I'll manage tomorrow. Tonight my normally forty-five minute commute took me an hour and forty minutes (that's more than twice its usual length!!) and I don't know what tomorrow's going to be like. Hopefully it will be better because I've been firmly instructed that I can't miss any (repeat any at all) more time from work without being written up. Despite the fact that I physically may not be able to go to work. Bah. Humbug.

Happy New Year All!! :)

During moving I bustificated my network card, and I haven't been able to scrape together the spare cash to get another one yet.My wii and my cell phone both go online, but neither one is particularly gamespot friendly, so my onlinings have mostly taken the form of emails and googling things. Also haven't made much headway with anything else lately, as my family's been taking up all my spare time.

this past week we hosted a 50th anniversary party for my grandparents, attended by no less than six of their children, and twenty four grandchildren. It was bustling. As a part of the main organizing family I've been run off my feet for about the last month trying to square the details of who stays with who, who feeds who, who picks up who at which airport, who missed which flight, and other details in the same vein.

I won't be around probably till after christmas because this family stuff is pretty expensive, but another card is in the works, and hopefully this spring a replacement for the junk laptop, maybemaybe.... *crosses fingers*

First must buy christmas presents, pay rent, and get car inspected.

Also, must recover from laryngitis and not get fired from missing too much work...

You can find me on XBL: SophinaK, or email, or even IM to phone. I try to reply. ;)

Moving. I don't like working an eight hour day (not including two hours of commuting) and then going for another three or four hours of scrubbing, packing, carrying, unpacking, and moving furniture. The good news is, things are starting to take shape a little more over at my apartment. The bathroom is mostly how I want it, if you take into account the fact that most of my everyday stuff isn't in there yet. The kitchen is also getting there. I can't find some of my pots and pans, but I'm sure I'll dig them up somewhere. I got a couch for the living room, and some little tables, and I've got a pretty good idea how I'm going to set things up. That said, there's so much left to do. None of my books hve been moved, and I have a LOT of books.... then there's clothes and the TV and all that other stuff that has to go somewhere. It just seems like it won't ever get done.

I exaggerate.

When it does get done, maybe a week and a half from now, I'll put up pictures.