what i did on my autumn vacation
Hi, internet. How have you been?
I'm sorry I've been falling so desperately behind on writing here. I try to be good about it, less for you and more because it's a personal record of what I do and when, something I can look back on to help my shitty memory. But, as I constantly say when I apologize for not writing as frequently, when I get depressed, I always feel like there are a million things more important than updating LJ that I should be doing, and feel guilty when I update LJ instead of doing these mythical things.
So, let's try to cover some ground.
We hired Kyleigh for my old job, taking away some of the stress that I've been under for the past few months. She's worked out really well so far--she's picked stuff up quickly and she's kind of a sarcastic asshole. We like her a lot. The two weeks I trained her, though, were intense. We were doing multiple interviews a day to fill another position (for a project I had been working on for my boss that was deemed to be enough work to justify hiring someone else--I WAS BASICALLY DOING THREE JOBS AND BEING PAID FOR ONE). We were fighting over who to hire. They were sending us terrible candidates. It was nuts. My boss was in all these meetings for the second project, Doug, Margaret and I were going insane.....yeah. I didn't realize how badly I needed a vacation until I was on mine.
So, two Fridays ago, I left Kyleigh in the capable hands of Margaret and Doug and went to visit quatredeathlady and Christine for the weekend. metonymy came with me! Friday night, Nicole, her friend Elodie, and I went to a haunted thing. It was three haunted things, actually. A house, a maze, and a bigger house/maze. The first was general terrifying things. The second was circus themed and actually less scary and more creepy/cool. The maze was hard to navigate and there more jump scares and less terror. The final part was this huge abattoir with chainsaw and scary shit and...yes. Terrifying. It was additionally a shit show because we kept getting stuck. Elodie accidentally stepped on my shoe and we had to stop so I could put it back on, then she got hit in the face with hanging "meat" and we had to stop (while being chased!) to make sure she was okay. In the pitch black "maze" bit of the butcher shop, I was in front and kept banging into things/getting lost trying to find the way out.
It was AWESOME.
The next night (after a day spent watching movies and lazing around), Nicole, Christine, Naomi and I met up with Nicole's friend Katie to see Then She Fell, an interactive performance art thing from the same people who did the steampunk haunted house we loved so much. This was a story based on Alice in Wonderland and staged in an old psychiatric facility in Brooklyn. We were Kickstarter backers and have been anxiously waiting for our chance to see it. I......cannot even describe this to you. I was so excited for it and it didn't disappoint. I might have to come back and do a whole entry on it, but even that wouldn't capture everything. It was creepy and unsettling and magical and amazing. If you're in New York and tickets become available (follow them on Twitter for updates!), go go go go GO.
Sunday, we went back to Boston. I dropped Naomi at her house and went home to start my week off.
I can't say that I did anything exciting? I didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted because there was SO MUCH I wanted to get done that I was just paralyzed into doing nothing because every time I tried to do something, I felt like I could be doing something more important. I slept a lot, which was good, and like I said, it wasn't until I wasn't at work that I realized how stressed and anxious and exhausted and unhappy I had been for the few weeks prior. So that, at least, was helpful. I did see the movie Sinister, which was ~*an adventure*~. I was the only one in the theatre for the 1pm Thursday showing, so I ended up moving to the back (so a monster couldn't sneak up behind me) and live-tweeting the film to keep myself from freaking out.
IT WAS REALLY GOOD. If you like horror films, definitely go see it! I would see it again, but I can't do it alone again and most of my local friends don't like horror films :\
Hm...I wrote a little (not much) and watched some shitty Netflix movies. I spent a lot of time chatting with liveonthesun, which is pretty awesome, fyi.
Then, Friday, momebie and barbed_whispers (aka Florida) got into town! Saturday morning we went to brunch with the two of them, littledust, brilligspoons, paper_tzipporah, metonymy and sky_was_green. Then we came back to our place and watched Into the Woods while drinking mimosas. Everyone except Florida dispersed (after a quick trip to the comic shop), and we spent the rest of the evening eating baked goods, drinking cider, and watching Hocus Pocus and The Worst Witch. Florida left eventually and I went crazy and started writing like a madwoman, producing more words in one night than I had my entire vacation in my efforts to finish a scary story by Halloween.
Sunday was THE BEST DAY. Karen, Margaret, Naomi, KL, and Lisa met up with us at Park Street and Becca led us on THE JERK TOUR OF BOSTON. The Jerk Tour was born about two years ago. Naomi came to visit us and we decided to walk the Freedom Trail. I read out loud from a tour book as we went, and we interjected our own jerk comments. At one point, a woman started following us around because she thought we were funny, and the idea for a full-on jerk tour emerged. Becca worked on the text of the tour for weeks, cobbling things together from different books and inserting her own commentary.
It was HILARIOUS. I will rescue the quotes from Twitter when I'm not at work, but you can look for them yourselves at #jerktour. Or by going back on my timeline, as I was the unofficial scribe, I guess, thanks to my obsession with writing down every funny thing we say.
We conked out as soon as we got home, putting on Ye Olde Pajamas and chilling for the rest of the night.
Yesterday was my first day back. They hired someone to fill the new job for that project my boss is working on. His name is Riley and he's cute, so we can keep him. (By which I mean, I find him endearing in a way that has nothing to do with physical looks.) (Yes, Riley and Kyleigh. Why was that a good idea?) I met with my new boss and we tried to define some of my new roles, but as we don't even know what department we're in right now, mostly I'm just floating along until we put something in concrete detail.
This week promises to be just as intense, unfortunately. Last night I had to go to Target, tonight I have to go to Michael's. Tomorrow I have to bake the cake, cupcakes, and pie for Nicole's party this weekend. Thursday is RiffTrax, and Friday we're leaving right from work for Nicole's. Hopefully, I'll be able to get everything done including finishing this story by next Wednesday. FINGERS CROSSED.
***
I would be remiss in neglecting to mention that SECRET MUTANT SIGN-UPS END TOMORROW. So, if you want to sign up, now would be an ideal time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to ask!
***
Okay, I'm going to try and write a little bit before my boss comes to pick me up for this meeting. Enjoy your afternoon, internet!
I'm sorry I've been falling so desperately behind on writing here. I try to be good about it, less for you and more because it's a personal record of what I do and when, something I can look back on to help my shitty memory. But, as I constantly say when I apologize for not writing as frequently, when I get depressed, I always feel like there are a million things more important than updating LJ that I should be doing, and feel guilty when I update LJ instead of doing these mythical things.
So, let's try to cover some ground.
We hired Kyleigh for my old job, taking away some of the stress that I've been under for the past few months. She's worked out really well so far--she's picked stuff up quickly and she's kind of a sarcastic asshole. We like her a lot. The two weeks I trained her, though, were intense. We were doing multiple interviews a day to fill another position (for a project I had been working on for my boss that was deemed to be enough work to justify hiring someone else--I WAS BASICALLY DOING THREE JOBS AND BEING PAID FOR ONE). We were fighting over who to hire. They were sending us terrible candidates. It was nuts. My boss was in all these meetings for the second project, Doug, Margaret and I were going insane.....yeah. I didn't realize how badly I needed a vacation until I was on mine.
So, two Fridays ago, I left Kyleigh in the capable hands of Margaret and Doug and went to visit quatredeathlady and Christine for the weekend. metonymy came with me! Friday night, Nicole, her friend Elodie, and I went to a haunted thing. It was three haunted things, actually. A house, a maze, and a bigger house/maze. The first was general terrifying things. The second was circus themed and actually less scary and more creepy/cool. The maze was hard to navigate and there more jump scares and less terror. The final part was this huge abattoir with chainsaw and scary shit and...yes. Terrifying. It was additionally a shit show because we kept getting stuck. Elodie accidentally stepped on my shoe and we had to stop so I could put it back on, then she got hit in the face with hanging "meat" and we had to stop (while being chased!) to make sure she was okay. In the pitch black "maze" bit of the butcher shop, I was in front and kept banging into things/getting lost trying to find the way out.
It was AWESOME.
The next night (after a day spent watching movies and lazing around), Nicole, Christine, Naomi and I met up with Nicole's friend Katie to see Then She Fell, an interactive performance art thing from the same people who did the steampunk haunted house we loved so much. This was a story based on Alice in Wonderland and staged in an old psychiatric facility in Brooklyn. We were Kickstarter backers and have been anxiously waiting for our chance to see it. I......cannot even describe this to you. I was so excited for it and it didn't disappoint. I might have to come back and do a whole entry on it, but even that wouldn't capture everything. It was creepy and unsettling and magical and amazing. If you're in New York and tickets become available (follow them on Twitter for updates!), go go go go GO.
Sunday, we went back to Boston. I dropped Naomi at her house and went home to start my week off.
I can't say that I did anything exciting? I didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted because there was SO MUCH I wanted to get done that I was just paralyzed into doing nothing because every time I tried to do something, I felt like I could be doing something more important. I slept a lot, which was good, and like I said, it wasn't until I wasn't at work that I realized how stressed and anxious and exhausted and unhappy I had been for the few weeks prior. So that, at least, was helpful. I did see the movie Sinister, which was ~*an adventure*~. I was the only one in the theatre for the 1pm Thursday showing, so I ended up moving to the back (so a monster couldn't sneak up behind me) and live-tweeting the film to keep myself from freaking out.
IT WAS REALLY GOOD. If you like horror films, definitely go see it! I would see it again, but I can't do it alone again and most of my local friends don't like horror films :\
Hm...I wrote a little (not much) and watched some shitty Netflix movies. I spent a lot of time chatting with liveonthesun, which is pretty awesome, fyi.
Then, Friday, momebie and barbed_whispers (aka Florida) got into town! Saturday morning we went to brunch with the two of them, littledust, brilligspoons, paper_tzipporah, metonymy and sky_was_green. Then we came back to our place and watched Into the Woods while drinking mimosas. Everyone except Florida dispersed (after a quick trip to the comic shop), and we spent the rest of the evening eating baked goods, drinking cider, and watching Hocus Pocus and The Worst Witch. Florida left eventually and I went crazy and started writing like a madwoman, producing more words in one night than I had my entire vacation in my efforts to finish a scary story by Halloween.
Sunday was THE BEST DAY. Karen, Margaret, Naomi, KL, and Lisa met up with us at Park Street and Becca led us on THE JERK TOUR OF BOSTON. The Jerk Tour was born about two years ago. Naomi came to visit us and we decided to walk the Freedom Trail. I read out loud from a tour book as we went, and we interjected our own jerk comments. At one point, a woman started following us around because she thought we were funny, and the idea for a full-on jerk tour emerged. Becca worked on the text of the tour for weeks, cobbling things together from different books and inserting her own commentary.
It was HILARIOUS. I will rescue the quotes from Twitter when I'm not at work, but you can look for them yourselves at #jerktour. Or by going back on my timeline, as I was the unofficial scribe, I guess, thanks to my obsession with writing down every funny thing we say.
We conked out as soon as we got home, putting on Ye Olde Pajamas and chilling for the rest of the night.
Yesterday was my first day back. They hired someone to fill the new job for that project my boss is working on. His name is Riley and he's cute, so we can keep him. (By which I mean, I find him endearing in a way that has nothing to do with physical looks.) (Yes, Riley and Kyleigh. Why was that a good idea?) I met with my new boss and we tried to define some of my new roles, but as we don't even know what department we're in right now, mostly I'm just floating along until we put something in concrete detail.
This week promises to be just as intense, unfortunately. Last night I had to go to Target, tonight I have to go to Michael's. Tomorrow I have to bake the cake, cupcakes, and pie for Nicole's party this weekend. Thursday is RiffTrax, and Friday we're leaving right from work for Nicole's. Hopefully, I'll be able to get everything done including finishing this story by next Wednesday. FINGERS CROSSED.
***
I would be remiss in neglecting to mention that SECRET MUTANT SIGN-UPS END TOMORROW. So, if you want to sign up, now would be an ideal time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to ask!
***
Okay, I'm going to try and write a little bit before my boss comes to pick me up for this meeting. Enjoy your afternoon, internet!