Yeah, well, yesterday kinda blew. A lot. Not quite a “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad, going to move to Australia” day…but not exactly sunshine-n-roses, either.
Monday evening I’d gotten a call from Nate to meet him over for coffee at a place about 2 blocks down Boylston from my apartment. All fine and dandy, was a nice evening, talking and playing chess — but the coffee was a bad idea. Having dramatically cut the amount of caffiene I take in from what I used to, my system isn’t conditioned to accept a sudden influx of stimulants at 6:30pm in the evening. I didn’t get to sleep until sometime around 1am…ugh. Not doing that again anytime soon…the coffee part, at least. The talk and the chess was fine.
Also that evening, after Nate and I parted ways, I’d decided to pick up batteries for my MiniDisc recorder so that I could work on recording another mix session. On the way down the hill to QFC, however, I saw Holly and Ryan getting out of Ryan’s car. Turns out they were meeting up with a friend at the Rosebud (a cafe/bar on Pike), and invited me along. Once there they introduced me to Trey, and not long afterwards Will, a friend of Trey’s, showed up, and the five of us kicked back and had a lot of fun talking and joking around for a while. I was hoping the two cosmopolitan martinis I had would offset the coffee, as alcohol tends to make me drowsy…unfortunately, no go. It did make for quite an entertaining evening, however, and after a while I headed home and eventually fell asleep.
Unfortunately, falling asleep at one in the morning doesn’t exactly help ensure a quick up-n-at-’em in the morning. I didn’t miss my bus, but I sure didn’t hop out of bed as quickly as I do when I crash out at 10pm. Anyway, once I got to work, things were pretty crazy from the start, which didn’t do a whole lot to help my mood. I’m just glad I don’t get hangovers — two martinis probably wouldn’t be enough to trigger one anyway, but you never know, right? Lunchtime rolls around and I head down to Todays to pick up my paycheck — only to find out that it’s not there yet.
This is one of my few big beefs about my current work/pay situation — Xerox has required that rather than using their own system, Todays has to use a third-party intermediate called White Amber to handle my pay. So, each week I need to go to White Amber’s website and input my hours. At that point, an e-mail gets sent to my supervisor within Xerox, who has to approve my hours. Once my hours are approved, then Todays can cut me my check. End result — too many cooks in the kitchen, and it is causing me all sorts of headaches. It already delayed my ‘official’ payday from each Friday to the following Monday, and then there are occasional things like this, when it’s not there Monday, not there Tuesday, and I have to call today to see if I’m going to get paid or not. Urgh…things like this make it really difficult to plan out a budget and keep my money on track.
Then, just to make the day even more entertaining, once I get home and check my mail, I find a bill from GCI for roughly $400. Now I’m really ticked — before I left state, I made sure to completely pay up my accounts with GCI, and made arrangements for my phone and cable modem service to be cut off at the end of June. Last month when I’d called up and talked to Miranda and Loren (as along with Shane, they are the current residents of The Pit), I’d found out that for some reason GCI had not disconnected my service — but they assured me that bills were being paid, and it wouldn’t end up causing me any problems. Grrrr…that bill sure seemed to be telling me a different story. As it turns out, though, that much at least may work out — I’ve talked to both Loren and GCI, and it’s all getting taken care of. I was lucky enough to get a GCI person that I knew (a guy named Clyde, who I’ve known around Anchorage for a few years, and was starting at GCI just as I was leaving), so he’s going to see what he can do to get the bill knocked off — when he checked my account the notation to have my service cut at the end of June is in there, it just never happened…so at least at one level, it’s definitely a GCI screwup. I should be getting a call on that sometime today.
I did get a chance to jabber with Loren for a while yesterday evening, which was cool. After sorting out some of the confusion with the GCI stuff (some of which turns out to be related to my cable modem — I thought I owned it, so told Loren he could hold onto it, GCI thought they owned it, so were adding bills to my account to make up for a ‘lost’ cable modem), we got each other caught up on all the general day-to-day bits. Sounds like I’m missing out on a lot of drama up there…can’t say I’m surprised, nor disappointed that I’m not involved anymore, to be completely honest. While there are some disadvantages to my current living situation, one of the definite advantages is a nearly totally drama-free lifestyle.
And that’s about it for the moment. I did manage to put together another mix session last night, which came out pretty nicely…I’m really hoping I can get a way to get the ones I’ve done onto MiniDisc (I’ve now got three or four that are MD-only currently) onto my computer, ripped to .mp3, and/or burned to CD sometime soon — at the very least, would be nice to finally put an update on my DJ Wudi propaganda page. I’ll get to it as soon as I can, though. Laters….