Thursday, August 31, 2006

Would Somebody Please Hire Me?!?

Hello, everyone. Long time, no write. Or read, for that matter. I’ve been neglecting everyone, but at least I’m neglecting you all equally, right?

So we’re into week five since I applied for my two almost-ideal jobs, and I still haven’t heard from either of them. They have one more week before I write them off completely (ooh! A threat!) Meanwhile, I have an interview tomorrow (yay!) for a slightly-less-than-ideal job, which is certainly not too shabby. It’s the only interview I’ve had all summer, and beggars can’t be choosers, right?

I’ve been highly disturbed to notice lately that it only took one and a half months in Seattle for my tan to fade into oblivion. Toulouse starts to get hot and sunny in March, and by July, I had worked up the darkest tan of my life. Basically, I went from glaring, translucent white to a nice, human shade of peach. Traveling around France for three weeks (which I realize I still haven’t written about) especially helped my tan along, so that I thought I would nice and sort of golden until at least October. But no. Seattle is just so pathetically sunlit that less than two months here has erased all memory of a tan. And it’s not that it’s been cloudy here. There have been a fair number of sunny days, some of them as hot as 90 degrees F (32 C). I have got to get out of this town. I need more sun! Doesn’t make much sense, though, that my number one choice of city to go to is London. Whatevs!

I did what I could to remedy my tint condition by going to Wild Waves with Becky and John the other day. I think we were the only people over 20 years old without children. It’s good to be unique, though, right? It was sunny and pretty warm, and I managed to get only very slightly sunburned. Now I’m kinda tan again, so it’s all good.

Okay, enough inane babble for today. Wish me luck in the job search!

Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Rambling Gene

My grandmother gave me some interesting news while we were visiting on Sunday. We were on the topic of geneology, and apparently, I'm 1/8 Norwegian! Isn't that exciting? I had no idea I was that big a fraction anything. I could totally go to Norway and act like I own the place! And also, some of my ancestors somewhere on my dad's side were some of the first settlers of America back in the 1600's. I have at least three ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, so I'm a true-blue American after all! I thought I was just a western European mutt with no roots or heritage, but no! I have roots! Yay me!

I was also reminded of one of the traits I've inherited from my grandfather. My grandfather loves to hear himself talk, and he usually tells stories about his past (or rants about "society these days"). When he talks, he does a few characterisitic things:

1. He rambles on forever without prompting
2. He goes on tangents and completely forgets his original point
3. He gives WAY too much background information

For example, Grandma mentioned "The Phantom Tollbooth" and Gramps took off talking about some quote from the book. He started in on the background information to set up delivery of the quote, then went off on a tangent inspired by the background info, rambled on for a while about why corporal punishment should be allowed in schools and how society's current problems all stem from the point in history at which corporal punishment was abolished in America's public schools. He never got back to the quote from the book, but no one really noticed anyway.

Anyway, I realized that I totally inherited this from my grandpa. Rambling on forever? Check. Tangents? Check (this is more a problem when I speak, and I don't really do it too much in my weblogging.) WAY too much background information? Check. I'm particularly bad at that one. I had to give a ten-minute presentation for work once, and my practice run was 20 minutes long because I was trying to give too much background info.

I guess I've been kind of self-conscious about this trait, but now that I realize both my dad and grandfather have it, too, I feel less self-conscious about it. I can't help it! It's in my genes!

Wouldn't it be cool to be the one to isolate the gene(s) responsible for rambling?

Saturday, August 12, 2006

What I Do When I Should Be Doing Something Else

Lazy, lazy, lazy. Yesterday, I slept until 1:30 in the afternoon. Eek! Today, I set my alarm for 8, hit snooze when it went off, slept until 9, then went back to sleep again until 10. I have issues.

I've been going through everything I own, trying to weed out the unnecessary, and I ended up with two and a half boxes of books I didn't want. I took them to Half Price Books to sell, and they gave me a measly 40 bucks! For two and a half boxes! Okay, okay, I know that's pretty reasonable. I don't know how much I was expecting to get; just, more, I guess. At any rate, I now have 40 dollars cash. Sweet! I've been walking around for the last three weeks with exactly one dollar, so that's definitely an improvement. One of these days, I'm gonna go through all my clothes and hawk them somewhere. My room here at my dad's is a total mess, almost the entire floor covered with my junk, and I'm sitting here doing what? Blogging. Like I said, lazy, lazy, lazy.

At least this weekend I'll be busy, busy, busy. Nickel Creek concert tonight, my dad's showing me around Renton tomorrow morning, a birthday party in the afternoon, something (can't remember what) in the evening, then we're driving down to Vancouver on Sunday to visit my grandparents (me gran's a wee bit ill). I haven't applied for any other laboratory jobs (I want to wait until I know that I definately did not get either of the two I really want), but I've been applying for waitressing jobs. Ick. What am I thinking? I hated waitressing! Oh, right, I'm thinking of the money. Money, money, money.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Le Sigh

Um, okay. So, I haven’t blogged in quite a while. Shall we recap?

The weekend of the 29th, my former step-dad (is a step-dad always a step-dad?) got married. To someone other than my mom. In order to ignore that fact and try to forget about it, my mom decided to go to an out-of-town resort for the weekend, and she took Jody and me with her (Becky and Amy went to the wedding, securing spots for themselves in my mother’s doghouse.) I had no desire to go to the wedding, but I was anxious about spending the whole weekend with my mom. Our lives have been rife with drama lately, and we haven’t been getting along well.

We went to Sun Mountain Resort, near Winthrop, WA, and it was really nice. Jody and I went horseback riding, and we all went for a chuck-wagon breakfast. It was beautiful, but I was on edge for much of the weekend.

The following Wednesday, Ross (my former step-dad), invited my sisters and me over for pizza. His new wife was there, and it was extremely awkward for me to be seeing Ross for the first time since November, and to have this strange new woman. It was odd seeing our old house and our old stuff being used by the two of them. It felt good to see Ross again, but I couldn’t really talk to him or catch up with him in that setting.

Anyway, he gave me some of my mom’s mail that had been sent to his house, and I waited until Saturday to give it to her. I was scared to tell her that I’d been to his house, because I knew she’d be upset (even though she told me she would be fine if I hung out with him). I’m not really going to get into the details, because it’s too hard to explain the nature of our relationship with our mom, but after a two-hour discussion, she asked me to move out. I’ve wanted to move out for a while, so I was mostly okay with this, but it probably could have come at a better time. Like, when I wasn’t broke as a joke and unemployed. It’s not that big a deal, though, because the rest of my family is being totally supportive and my dad and his wife welcomed me into their home with open arms.

It’s just hard to have my mom upset with me when I don’t feel like I did anything wrong. My heart, conscience, brain, whatever is telling me I didn’t do anything and that I’m a good person, but my mom is trying her darnedest to convince me otherwise.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at. My laptop isn’t yet set up for internet here, so I’m not sure how often I’ll be blogging or reading blogs, but I hope everyone is doing okay out there in blogland. Bisous!