(no subject)
Hello everyone.
Sorry that I've been away for so long. I'm going to try to ease back into being on LJ more again, especially since Tom paid for another year and set up automatic payments as a surprise so I wouldn't lose my settings and icons, so I really shouldn't let it go to waste.
The past few months have been good. And at times crazy. In some ways, it's hard to believe it's mid-July already. In other ways, I curse time for not being faster... The Dark Knight opens on Friday. I've got tickets and everything and I'm just chomping at the bit to see it. And on July 26th, I'll finally get a new schedule at work so I'll be available to hang out with friends on weekends again! (yay!)
Oh goodness, so much has been going on. I have a vehicle again!!! It's a 1986 Dodge Ram 15 passenger van. Seriously HUGE. It used to belong to Tom's family's church, and they decided to get rid of it and Tom's parents arranged for us to get it. It has a lot of work that needs to be done to it, but it gets from point a to point b and can carry 15 people on the trip between. *LOL* Trying to park it is insane.
Work has been fine. I'm so happy that I'm moving to Monday through Friday again, but I also somewhat feel bad because I like everyone in the group that I'm working with now and they all seem disappointed that I'm moving to a different shift. But having 8 hours shifts again will be nice, and it's an afternoon shift so I'll be able to sleep in a bit again. I think it will be better for me in a physical sense cause my sleep schedule will even out, and I won't have the stress anymore that I've had on Friday and Monday mornings of trying to wake up at 6 am. It'll be good. And if I find I don't like afternoons, then I can try for something better in December.
And I can do stuff with the con again!!! Besides spending time with friends, being able to do stuff for the con, like attending a freaking meeting for once this year, is the biggest benefit of all. I miss being involved with Kumoricon as much as I had been in past years and in order to get more involved next year I have to stay away from the weekend shift completely because the two just don't mesh at all. And I can attend the Pocky Club meetings Tom holds.
And I can play in RPG's again. Of course, I don't want to fill every weekend day of every week like Tom does, but I can at least be active in Tom's Vampire the Masquerade came, and maybe join a game the alternating weekend on Sunday afternoon or something. I just don't want to fill every day of every weekend with games cause I want to be able to hang out with friends and go out on the weekends too.
There's just so much I've been feeling I'm missing out on. And while having three days off a week has been nice... I've felt so isolated from the very beginning. There have been entire days where I've seen no one. No one at all. Not even Tom because he'd be at work, and then would go to hang out with Ryan and Becca to game or something.
And I'm a person who is ok by myself. I can go out to dinner alone. I can go to a movie alone. I can bum around the house and find ways to amuse myself.
But there's something to be said for prolonged isolation... not being good. Can't really think of a better way to put it. You can be alone for a day and it feels like a welcome respite from the insanity of the world. But multiple days a week for months on end... it gets depressing.
While the work day isn't horrible cause I have nice people there that are friendly and will talk to me and make conversation, on the days when I know that other people are getting together to do something fun and I should be in on that too... It really eats at me.
I know people around me care, and actually everyone has been really great about trying to include me and trying to arrange for fun stuff to happen on days and times where I can show up, even if it's late... But there's still stuff I miss out on because Saturday and Sunday afternoon is prime "Let's go out and have fun" time, and not everything can be rearranged to suit me. Not that I'd ever expect everyone to bend everything to suit me.
Tom's also been really great... He actually changed his schedule to have more time with me. He still has weekends off, but he went on a 4 day 10 hour shift schedule and took Wednesdays off so that we'd at least have one entire day together. That's been awesome and has helped a lot.
It's also better now that I have a vehicle. I could use public transportation before without a problem, because my job gives me a free bus pass good for anywhere I want to go for an entire year, for free. It's great for commuting, and has really been a life saver the entire year. I was able to get places and get stuff done. But anything you have to do if you're using trimet takes double or triple the time it would take if you just had a car. So, running errands, most of the time I could probably do in an hour or less... On Trimet might take more like the entire afternoon. And honestly there's times where I just don't feel like walking all over hell and creation, especially in the afternoon when it's 90 degrees out. Or it's 40 degrees out and raining. Or I'm just tired. *L* So being able to go more places faster without having to rely on someone else is nice again. I missed the freedom of it.
Of course, I don't miss the burden of paying for extremely expensive gasoline, so I'm really careful about how much I'm driving, but I've always tried to be good about helping friends out with gas money if they're driving me around or letting me take their car somewhere.
And while I was on that whole tangent it occurred to me again to bring up the major milestone... I've been working at the same place a whole year as of last week. Yay! The employer doesn't actually count it as being a whole year until October because they didn't officially hire me until I left training, but I started training on July 9th of last year. Things have been really good at the job since I got over the whole "first six month probation" thing, and most of the places that I've worked at before, I wanted out by the time I got to the end of the first six months. But I feel a lot better and a lot more stable at this place, and hey, I've made it this far, I don't plan to quit, and I'm not being threatened with getting fired at all... So it's good. And I'm doing well with it, I feel pretty confident that I'm not going to be the person who makes a stupid mistake that causes the Ops Manager to call me into her office and ask me what the hell I was thinking. So, maybe they'll keep me. *L*
For the first time in quite a long time, if not ever, I feel like maybe I could stay at this company... Be a "lifer" here. Even when I was working at Tiffany's in Michigan (the pizza parlor), I didn't stay there a year and a half because I thought one day I'd be management. It was a good job for that time in my life and I made a crap load of money in tips. For a girl who's 20-21, lives with her parents, and only really has car insurance, and phone bills to worry about for responsibilities, it worked. And when I left, everything was amicable. They knew for about a year ahead of time that I'd be moving, and people I worked with offered to be used as a reference when I moved forward. But even if I had never moved, I would have tried to find a more stable "grown up" job not involving food eventually.
All the other centers I've worked at... I don't know. If you aren't management (or in some cases even if you were), you're temporary... even if you're not through a temp agency. You're a dime a dozen and you're replaceable. I don't really get that feeling here, especially since there's people here that have been working here for years, even just as customer service reps. But there's other things to do with the company, other places to go with it. I'm not looking for promotions yet, but I'm thinking maybe two or three years down the line getting into mentoring and training, or help desk. Stuff like that. This is the kind of stability that I've wanted, so I'm pretty happy with that.
Tom and I are good. :) We're very happy right now having a place that's ours that we share. Moving in together a couple of years ago was in and of itself a really good positive step, but now that Ryan has his own place, we've settled into our apartment just being ours. I would have to say, other than a happy stable lifelong commitment, the best part about getting married was all the presents people gave us. Most everything is unpacked now and has a place... there's a few things that we haven't quite unpacked yet. Actually we just got a couple more presents too. *L* But yeah, we're just settling into life again.
All good things. All good things.
I was going to end this post here... And then I realized there was one more thing that had to be shared and I didn't want to create another post today to spam you all with.
So here's a link I want you all to click.
It's called what my husband does when I'm not home.
Reason enough that I need to be home more often...
Sorry that I've been away for so long. I'm going to try to ease back into being on LJ more again, especially since Tom paid for another year and set up automatic payments as a surprise so I wouldn't lose my settings and icons, so I really shouldn't let it go to waste.
The past few months have been good. And at times crazy. In some ways, it's hard to believe it's mid-July already. In other ways, I curse time for not being faster... The Dark Knight opens on Friday. I've got tickets and everything and I'm just chomping at the bit to see it. And on July 26th, I'll finally get a new schedule at work so I'll be available to hang out with friends on weekends again! (yay!)
Oh goodness, so much has been going on. I have a vehicle again!!! It's a 1986 Dodge Ram 15 passenger van. Seriously HUGE. It used to belong to Tom's family's church, and they decided to get rid of it and Tom's parents arranged for us to get it. It has a lot of work that needs to be done to it, but it gets from point a to point b and can carry 15 people on the trip between. *LOL* Trying to park it is insane.
Work has been fine. I'm so happy that I'm moving to Monday through Friday again, but I also somewhat feel bad because I like everyone in the group that I'm working with now and they all seem disappointed that I'm moving to a different shift. But having 8 hours shifts again will be nice, and it's an afternoon shift so I'll be able to sleep in a bit again. I think it will be better for me in a physical sense cause my sleep schedule will even out, and I won't have the stress anymore that I've had on Friday and Monday mornings of trying to wake up at 6 am. It'll be good. And if I find I don't like afternoons, then I can try for something better in December.
And I can do stuff with the con again!!! Besides spending time with friends, being able to do stuff for the con, like attending a freaking meeting for once this year, is the biggest benefit of all. I miss being involved with Kumoricon as much as I had been in past years and in order to get more involved next year I have to stay away from the weekend shift completely because the two just don't mesh at all. And I can attend the Pocky Club meetings Tom holds.
And I can play in RPG's again. Of course, I don't want to fill every weekend day of every week like Tom does, but I can at least be active in Tom's Vampire the Masquerade came, and maybe join a game the alternating weekend on Sunday afternoon or something. I just don't want to fill every day of every weekend with games cause I want to be able to hang out with friends and go out on the weekends too.
There's just so much I've been feeling I'm missing out on. And while having three days off a week has been nice... I've felt so isolated from the very beginning. There have been entire days where I've seen no one. No one at all. Not even Tom because he'd be at work, and then would go to hang out with Ryan and Becca to game or something.
And I'm a person who is ok by myself. I can go out to dinner alone. I can go to a movie alone. I can bum around the house and find ways to amuse myself.
But there's something to be said for prolonged isolation... not being good. Can't really think of a better way to put it. You can be alone for a day and it feels like a welcome respite from the insanity of the world. But multiple days a week for months on end... it gets depressing.
While the work day isn't horrible cause I have nice people there that are friendly and will talk to me and make conversation, on the days when I know that other people are getting together to do something fun and I should be in on that too... It really eats at me.
I know people around me care, and actually everyone has been really great about trying to include me and trying to arrange for fun stuff to happen on days and times where I can show up, even if it's late... But there's still stuff I miss out on because Saturday and Sunday afternoon is prime "Let's go out and have fun" time, and not everything can be rearranged to suit me. Not that I'd ever expect everyone to bend everything to suit me.
Tom's also been really great... He actually changed his schedule to have more time with me. He still has weekends off, but he went on a 4 day 10 hour shift schedule and took Wednesdays off so that we'd at least have one entire day together. That's been awesome and has helped a lot.
It's also better now that I have a vehicle. I could use public transportation before without a problem, because my job gives me a free bus pass good for anywhere I want to go for an entire year, for free. It's great for commuting, and has really been a life saver the entire year. I was able to get places and get stuff done. But anything you have to do if you're using trimet takes double or triple the time it would take if you just had a car. So, running errands, most of the time I could probably do in an hour or less... On Trimet might take more like the entire afternoon. And honestly there's times where I just don't feel like walking all over hell and creation, especially in the afternoon when it's 90 degrees out. Or it's 40 degrees out and raining. Or I'm just tired. *L* So being able to go more places faster without having to rely on someone else is nice again. I missed the freedom of it.
Of course, I don't miss the burden of paying for extremely expensive gasoline, so I'm really careful about how much I'm driving, but I've always tried to be good about helping friends out with gas money if they're driving me around or letting me take their car somewhere.
And while I was on that whole tangent it occurred to me again to bring up the major milestone... I've been working at the same place a whole year as of last week. Yay! The employer doesn't actually count it as being a whole year until October because they didn't officially hire me until I left training, but I started training on July 9th of last year. Things have been really good at the job since I got over the whole "first six month probation" thing, and most of the places that I've worked at before, I wanted out by the time I got to the end of the first six months. But I feel a lot better and a lot more stable at this place, and hey, I've made it this far, I don't plan to quit, and I'm not being threatened with getting fired at all... So it's good. And I'm doing well with it, I feel pretty confident that I'm not going to be the person who makes a stupid mistake that causes the Ops Manager to call me into her office and ask me what the hell I was thinking. So, maybe they'll keep me. *L*
For the first time in quite a long time, if not ever, I feel like maybe I could stay at this company... Be a "lifer" here. Even when I was working at Tiffany's in Michigan (the pizza parlor), I didn't stay there a year and a half because I thought one day I'd be management. It was a good job for that time in my life and I made a crap load of money in tips. For a girl who's 20-21, lives with her parents, and only really has car insurance, and phone bills to worry about for responsibilities, it worked. And when I left, everything was amicable. They knew for about a year ahead of time that I'd be moving, and people I worked with offered to be used as a reference when I moved forward. But even if I had never moved, I would have tried to find a more stable "grown up" job not involving food eventually.
All the other centers I've worked at... I don't know. If you aren't management (or in some cases even if you were), you're temporary... even if you're not through a temp agency. You're a dime a dozen and you're replaceable. I don't really get that feeling here, especially since there's people here that have been working here for years, even just as customer service reps. But there's other things to do with the company, other places to go with it. I'm not looking for promotions yet, but I'm thinking maybe two or three years down the line getting into mentoring and training, or help desk. Stuff like that. This is the kind of stability that I've wanted, so I'm pretty happy with that.
Tom and I are good. :) We're very happy right now having a place that's ours that we share. Moving in together a couple of years ago was in and of itself a really good positive step, but now that Ryan has his own place, we've settled into our apartment just being ours. I would have to say, other than a happy stable lifelong commitment, the best part about getting married was all the presents people gave us. Most everything is unpacked now and has a place... there's a few things that we haven't quite unpacked yet. Actually we just got a couple more presents too. *L* But yeah, we're just settling into life again.
All good things. All good things.
I was going to end this post here... And then I realized there was one more thing that had to be shared and I didn't want to create another post today to spam you all with.
So here's a link I want you all to click.
It's called what my husband does when I'm not home.
Reason enough that I need to be home more often...