Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Home Sick not Homesick--well, not really.

Well, I went home from work sick today, because I felt horrible. It wasn't like I was going to throw up or anything, but I wasn't working at even half my normal capacity. My eyes were dry and scratchy. My head was throbbing, and I was exhausted.

I would imagine a hangover feels something like that.

Since I had tommorow off, I asked if I could go home and work on Thursday instead. They agreed and I went home after only working 1.5 hours.

On the drive home, I didn't even put my music on. I just drove home, eyes half closed, driving in a daze. Before I knew it I was home, and I flopped onto bed and slept for almost 4 hours.

I still don't feel that much better. I had some lunch (a ham sandwich) and two excedrin, and those seem to be helping with the headache, but I need to drink a lot of water/fluids too. I think that might be why I am so sore and low energy.

It really motivates me to get a better diet. Cooking and planning meals for one person is terrible! It's such a hassle to do all that work just for yourself. I'd much rather cook for a group than just myself.

Oh well.

Called Emerson College's Financial Aid Department and asked them why the heck I hadn't received my award letter yet. They said it has been created, but it hasn't been mailed out yet and that I can expect it in 7-10 business days. Argh. I'm so worried.

I did laundry the other day, and today I'll probably have to do some grocery shopping. Tanner has expressed interest in learning how to drive a standard transmission, but won't commit to a time to learn. Hopefully I can convince him to try it tonight.

This friday, Jonathan Paula comes to town for the weekend, and we are going to rock out and explore the town(s) where I grew up. Perhaps he will force me to go to the beach or OOB (Old Orchard Beach, for those who don't know) niether of which I have done in years. My plans for his visit include: going to mardens (comparing it to Building 19 & 7/8ths), Showing him the houses I used to live in, walking around town looking at all the awesome architecture and mill buildings, playing Mario Kart Double Dash on the Game cube, tracking down one of the two deloreans in the Lewiston Auburn area and getting some pictures, Maybe playing age of mythology on the LAN, maybe visiting where I work or going to the LL Bean Flagship store, if the darn candlepin bowling alley hadn't closed recently, I'd have taken him there but alas. What else? That's probably about it, since there ain't a helluva lot to do in this town. We'll probably visit all the parks and landmarks, too.

Lot's of photo ops.

Well, I guess that'll end this post for today, but hopefully all is well with everyone. Until next time!

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Earthquake In Boston

So last night, I had a dream, and I wrote it down as soon as I woke up. Here it is.

I was flying in on a plane, and suddenly the wind picked up, answe clipped the edge of a high rise building on our way into the airport. At that moment, an earthquake hit, and though the plane was not shaking, the runway was, but the pilot successfully landed the plane.

Somehow, I was magically in the dorm room in the high rise that we clipped (maybe it was an apartment building) but Dan, Joe and I were living there.and Dan was showing us how he had an inflatable car. It was literally the size of a very large vacuum cleaner when folded up, but it unfolded into a compact car. It was partially nylon for some of the walls, so I commented that he'd probably not fair well in an accident. Dan mentioned how much he hated public transportation. I looked out the window towards the beautiful city of boston. Suddenly the earthquake hit, (but it was the same earthquake that occured before, when I was on the plane, I guess I was in two places at once.

I screamed to jump under a table and did so, as Dan hid somewhere else. I don't know where Joe was. It seemed to last a lifetime. Definately over a minute. I looked out the window and saw the trees on the shore shaking violently. When it was all over, it seemed like the city had faired pretty well. I noted that the back bay was still there, and had not sunk due to liqifaction like my Natural Disasters and Earth Sciences teacher had predicted.

For some reason, I decided to head into the main part of the city (For some reason this high rise seemed to be in cambridge.) Since we still had power, I tried taking public transportation, IE, the green line, and it actually worked. For a little while. The train stopped in the middle of the tracks and I had to wind my way up many flights of stairs and down narrow passages trying to find a way out.

In the process, I came accross some sort of major machine room for the T, and workers were trying to fix damaged machinary. The foreman leading the repairwork was none other than Pete Chvany. I talked to him briefly, and tried to reconnect some severed wires, but apparently I did it wrong, and I told him how impressed I was that a film director knew so much about subway machinery. I left and made my way to the surface again.

Somehow I made my way back to the dorm (I don't know if I even made it accross the Charles/Bay (I don't know where anything was because it was only a verisimilitude of boston, because as you know, the Green line isn't underground at Cambridge, but I still was underground on the greenline there). When I got to the dorm, I peeked into the room, and couldn'g find Joe or Dan. So I peeked into the neighbors room too. There floorboard were litterally spread out so that there were gaps you could see through in them. As I gingerly and carefully walked out of the weekend room, I (for some reason) paused to close the doors on the refridgerator, as the power was still on, and I guess I wanted to make sure that their food would keep.

As I steeped out into the hallway/elevator lobby, I spotted a young black security guard, and flagged her down. "Excuse me, miss" I said, "Where is everyone?" She said that they'd all been evacuated, and she was searching for others, because many people were just staying put. Then, from around the corner, my Civil Rights class professor, Mike Brown walked by and said hello. We were all in shock, but we still exchanged pleasantries. When suddenly I looked out the window behind Mike and noticed the giant wave coming in from the ocean. I screamed, and ran for the stairs, and the other two followed, evidently seeing what I saw. Mike Brown was running and I looked back as the wave crashed into the building, bending and twisting it. Somehow the stairs remained intact as parts of the floor began to break away, including the landings, which meant that we had to vault over the railing to get turned around to go up the next flight of stairs. Mike brown screamed that he should have known to get to higher ground, as everyone talked about the tsunamis that follow earthquakes ever since the Indian ocean tsunami on Christmas Day 2005. We got to the top of the building to some kind of atruim, and the building had definately disintigrated beneath us. We began to float, but I don't know weather the wave was still going in or going back out, but we were floating, and we were alive. I think I remember smiling in spite of my fear.

We picked up some more people on some other floating debris, but I was still the youngest survior. We floated trying to keep our strange bouyancy for tipping over. We began to float towards an auto body shop, where an empty lift sat right at the waterline. We somehow steered or through the grace of god landed on it, and beached on it so that as the water receeded from under us, we didn't float out to see. I had no idea were we were. But the water receeded and we all got off of our raft.

I'm really shaky about this next part, so I may make stuff up to fill in the blanks in my head.

I think I grabbed a walking stick and started poking around, and then I began to pray. And god spoke to me. I don't remeber exactly what he said or exactly what I said but I think I said the wrong thing or something, because I was overcome with emotion, and I started sobbing, leaning on my stick, crying out through my tears: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I've never talked to god before" and "How can I lead this people to safety, I don't know anything".

Everyone was watching me, and to my suprise, I think that they all knew that I wasn't crazy, that I really was talking to god. Maybe it was the fact that all those fantastic events had occured that day, but not one person questioned it.

After that, I woke up.

Strange dream, no?

Friday, June 16, 2006

I'm Still Alive, and Pay is now coming in!

Well, I finally got paid. Took 'em long enough! Not that I'm bitter.

Here's my question? Where is the line between having character and BEING a character. And why is character building so good but being a character can be so bad?

Just a thought.

Things are going well, work is riding me hard as we prep for the huge sample sale next week. Lots of hard work, but fun too. Now I'm off to bed so that I can dream a little dream--maybe it will be beautiful.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

The Sample Sale Is Coming!

Well, I'm sorry that I haven't updated this blog in a while, I've been hassled about it, but like that's anything new. Sometimes it really makes me wonder why I ever started the dang thing. If I didn't have a weblog, I'd probably have to e-mail people individually to let them know what's going on, but even when I do post, I still get e-mails asking for response. Oh well.

Anyway, I had a very busy day of work today at the North Face. We are having a Sample Sale this year, which is when we sell off all of the salesman's samples from the last year at a dramatically reduced price. However, this is insane because we received 1100 boxes today. In a normal shipment we might get 200. So we got over 5 times as much (about one full semi-truck load) product in one day. This means that over the course of the day, 8am-11am we got all the boxes out of the truck and CRAMMED onto our tiny loading dock so that the trucker could leave. Then from 11-6pm we moved boxes into the building and around 3pm some of us got to consolidate the smaller boxes into bigger boxes. WHOOPEE! It was very tiring but a lot of fun, and our boss bought us all pizza and drinks for lunch because he knows how hard of a day it was for us all.

The little boxes were funny because we had about 400 of them. They are about the size of a medium pizza box, and each contained and average of ONE item. For example, a hat or a pair of gloves, just rolling around in there. We filled half a dumpster with the cardboard from those tiny boxes, and all the product consolidated into like one box!

The reason that the garments were like this was because they keep individually boxed items at the warehouse so that they can send out the one sample when they are requested, and they had those left over. AWESOME! Another cool thing about the day was that Sarah was in Freeport with her clients teaching them comparison shopping, and so we got to say hi and hug. Unfortunately I had to get back to work, as did she, but it was nice to see her again.

What else?

Oh yes, so I finished my book called "The Wal-Mart Effect" and it was very good, and provided a nice and objective approach to the wal-mart phenomenon. It really shed some light on some important ideas, but as the book inself admits, wal-mart is so secretive with it's information that it is hard to pin down solid facts.

I should be heading to bed. My roommate, Tanner, has to get up at 6:30am for work, so he's already in bed and he is snoring! LOUDLY. It's kind of comical.

I've still got a lot of things on my list to do, but to be perfectly honest, now that Tanner and I are home at reletively the same time, we end up play Age Of Mythology a lot over the LAN. Oh well. At least I know I'll get things done on monday.

Monday, June 05, 2006

Okay, so I lied... Sue Me.

Yeah. I said it, but it was a teaser--and a lie. I don't even remember what I was going to write about, because it really wasn't that important. Oh well.

It's my day off from work today, and I have been busy running errands, and trying to get started on other projects that I have been putting off. Monday's will probably always be my day to get things done because Tanner is at work and so I have to spend the whole day just chillin' out.

Went to the library and got three books "The Case Against The Direct Election Of The President: A Defense of the Electoral College" by Judith Best, "What it means to be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation" by Charles Murray, and "The Wal-Mart Effect" By Charles Fishman. Some heavy reading, I know, but all very interesting topics. I think that I should have taken out a fiction book too, to balance things out, but maybe I'll get audio books and listen to them in the car on the way too and from work. That would certainly be a better use of my time than listening to music.

Oh well. I've got my computer up and running again, just about everything is back to normal, including my harddrive which I had thought had died! I remained positive, and it turns out that it is working again. This time, however, I will burn backups of all my photography and other data. My new DVD burner is working famously, and I've ordered some new DVD-Rs to complete my backup process. Apparently my old DVD burner was crap. Not really that suprised, since the computer actually called it "GENERIC DVD-R/RW BURNER". Hahahhaha. Whatever.

I helped out with Auburn Adult Ed graduation on Friday night, it was a truck shoot, so we brought the truck (actually a van) out and set up three cameras in the ELHS gymnasium and shot the event live. It was nice to do that again. But not terribly exciting either. Lewiston High School is having their graduation tommorow night, but I'm not sure I'll make that one, because I have work the next morning.

Other than that, I'm still fledgling along with ideas for my film productions, and I have gotten a little jealous of people who are doing things like making films this summer. (Thanks, Facebook, for showing me how much cool stuff my friends are doing while I am just working.)

What else? Well, there really isn't much else. I'm still trying to get back into touch with my creative self, the self that was willing to take risks, fool around and make something stupid just for the sake of making it. Wish me luck.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Tommorow...!

I'll post a full update tommorow, and I'll tell you all about it.