I’ve been working for a month now (on and off) on a very special item (yes, a knitted one) for my Loopy Ewe Swap partner, and the end is at last in sight. To be honest, I haven’t heard from her in a while, and it worries me a bit - especially since she doesn’t have a blog and is only somewhat active on Ravelry. Hopefully, she’s doing fine! And hopefully, she loves her gift when she gets it! I know I love it!

Also, coming up on halfway through a Very Long Week at work. I’ve worked three 12-hour shifts in a row, and have two more to go before I go back to working regular 8-hour days. Yes, that’s right. Five 12-hour shifts in a row, and then I don’t even get any days off for another two days. And all this after getting only one day off before it began . That’s the day in which I spent doing laundry like mad, and making The Most Horrible Swedish Meatballs Ever, otherwise known as Swedish Allspice Balls, because that’s what they tasted like. Allspice - and lots of it. Gah. (It wasn’t my fault, to be fair - the recipe demanded that much allspice, and like an imbecile, I just didn’t question it.) So instead of eating tons of yummy meatballs all week while I have no time to cook, I’m eating Hamburger Freaking Helper, greasy potato chips, and bar pizza. Urgh. Not exactly food to fuel you for a week of hellish hours.

Luckily, all the tons of overtime should make up for it. Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, to kill sometime at work, when the hours get really really long, I’ve been hunting down podcasts and listening to them. So far, Faerie Knitting is my favorite. Go have yourself a little fairy tale now. Enjoy.

That’s how my immediate supervisor communicates. ALL CAPS, VERY STERNLY. When on paper, anyway. In person, she stutters and bumbles and looks panicked and gets flustered all over the place, but on paper, hoo boy, does she sound like she means it.

Today, I went into work to find not one, but THREE gigantic notes typed up in all caps, threatening doom if we watched television or surfed the internet, or dared sip a cup of coffee (haha, just kidding on that one) before we had all of our office complaints typed up in a terribly outdated log. For those not in the know, I work as a dispatcher at a sheriff’s office, so our “complaints” are literally complaints from the public, wanting us to take action in a) unlocking their cars, b) dealing with stolen gas, c) removing pesky trains from the tracks, or d) bringing peace and goodwill to all men (except that weirdo across the street who looked funny - could we please escort him out of town a.s.a.p.?). We take these complaints and handwrite them onto little slips of paper, and type up all the information in our daily logs, and then, at the end of the year, my supervisor FREAKS THE FUCK OUT and tosses all the year’s closed and cleared complaints at us in a panic, wanting them typed up in a separate complaint log YESTERDAY, because HOLY GOD IT’S NOVEMBER ALREADY!

Now, what she wants done here is for the complaints to be categorized, then put into numerical order, then typed up into categories (in numerical order, obviously) so someday, some poor sap can hunt through a billion binders full of logs and hopefully have a better chance of finding the specific complaint where Joe Blow called Jane Doe nasty names on the telephone. There’s a category for that - Telephone, in fact - but if Joe Blow was actually Jane Doe’s hubby, it might be filed under Domestic, or maybe Harassment, or maybe something else entirely. Now, you might be thinking to yourself: aren’t there computer programs that can do this sort of thing?

Why yes. There are. But we’re not going to use that new fangled shit, no way. We like paper. We like typing shit up ten thousand times in ten thousand ways. We like not having a fucking clue, and sitting in a paperific firetrap, thank you very much.

So anyway. Today, I walk into work, and she’s got this BIG SCARY NOTE taped up on two computers AND the foot-tall stack of complaints themselves. You know, in case we miss it. Or something.

More likely, because she’s a fucking psycho who is trying to be big and intimidating and scary, and really, she doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing and is trying to cover her ass with BIG LETTERS and REDUNDANCY.

Gah.

And then, she has this HORRIBLE microsoft word table document that’s fucked four ways from Sunday with weird boxes of text announcing that these are complaints, and gah, just much weirdness and badness, with margins that slide off the edges of the pages and all… and I am supposed to USE this?

Er. No. First thing I do? Hop on the internet to bitch to pals about my supervisor’s idiocy, and then draft out a new form that isn’t filled with bizarro. She’d gotten about 35 complaints typed up in her shift. And of course, her BIG SCARY NOTE. I got about 100 done, perhaps more, mostly during commercial breaks of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and I didn’t even start really, until my shift was halfway over, because my egocentric deputy (yes, egocentric, not eccentric) wouldn’t leave until FIVE A.M. He normally goes home at three. There was nothing going on. He just wanted to talk. And talk. And talk. About himself. And his thoughts. And his dreams (literal ones in his sleep, not “oh, I dream of going to Ireland one day!”). And his politics. And bitch about everyone but himself. And gah. Shoot. Me. Please.

So yeah. There you go. I told my supervisor in the morning not to touch the complaints, thank you very much, and to tell Ellen, who I work with, not to touch them either; I will type the damned things up myself so at least it looks professional, and not like a kindergartener was playing with the computer.

Tell me… why the hell do I work here?

Why?

Holy crap. It’s 6:30 a.m., and I can barely keep my eyes open. Vacation was the dumbest idea ever.

That’s what I did last night. A year and a half ago, I finally came up with a budgeting system that works for me. I know, I know, you hear the word ‘budget’ and you run screaming as if I’d just told you to hand over every one of your paychecks to the tightwad gazette for the rest of your life.

Not so. Budgeting is really pretty harmless, even to those with spending addictions. Like myself. And it’s simple. Takes up hardly any time, and makes it so I don’t HAVE to feel guilty - or play dumb - when I buy something, and then get a ‘your check has bounced’ noticed from the bank.

Budgeting is all about finding out how much money you can spend for fun, made possible by doing a little math every now and then to figure out how much money you need for… well, things you NEED. Like rent, and telephone, and heat, and mac n cheese. Yep. I do not budget so I can be in control of my finances. I budget so I don’t have to put a billion things I truly desire back on the shelf all because I can’t figure out whether I’ll have enough money to pay the phone bill coming up in two weeks. See? It’s rewarding!

I have a fun system that works for me. There’s budget calculators all over the web for free, budget worksheets, programs like quicken, yadda yadda. They’re nice, but they tend not to fit ME too well. I’ve got an unusual situation - I don’t pay a lot of bills that some people do - and I do have some odd bills that most budget things don’t calculate for.

My tools:

I use an index card system, with a little binder clip to keep them all together so I can pack the current and recent past cards (up to a year’s worth) around with me wherever I go, such as, to work, where I do most of my budgeting.

Every paycheck gets its own index card. Every paycheck varies with my schedule, so I do about 3 months at a time, and when I get into the third month, I do up another three months or so, counting ahead and figuring out what each paycheck will be. I average out my net total every month, and now have a handy little list of what (on average) my paycheck will be for all the usual shift configurations I have.

Then I list out what bills need to be paid that month, and the dates. And eventually, I plug them into the cards, ensuring that a) every bill gets paid on time (I typically pay bills twice a month - on payday), and b) I always have some, at least a little, extra money left over. Twice a year, when three paychecks come in a month, it all gets screwed up, and I have to pay bills on different checks than usual, or sometimes, I’ll just have a short paycheck, and have to split up a bill between a couple checks. That’s why I do three months at a time - much easier that way to keep things like that from sneaking up on me.

I do a rough draft on paper, where I write additional notes, such as the number of days worked in that pay period, overtime/holiday pay notes, etc. and THEN I commit them to index cards. I don’t like to scribble all over my index cards rearranging things. I do it anyway, every month but I like my first scribbles to be done on paper. I keep the paper for future reference, too. Just in case.

Anyway. I’ve done my budgeting through April, actually. Why April? Because March was a three-paycheck month, and stopping there and not knowing what was up with April was driving me nuts.

Anyway, my conclusion from all of this? I should be able to buy a new computer! See how much fun that was? Definitely worth the time it took.

I have been working soooo much lately. I haven’t had my full 3 days off [My ‘weekends’ are 3 days off every 6 days on. Well, nights, really.] in nearly 3 weeks now. This last ‘weekend’, I didn’t get any days off, so I’ve now been working for 12 days straight, with 3 more to go. I’m starting to feel like I live here at the office. My house is a wreck, I can’t sleep for the heat, and I’m starting to need more than a cuppa tea to keep me going at night.

So knitting has been slow, and slow has everything else. I have Clue 1 completed in the Mystery Stole, and have half of Clue 2 done. As in, one of the two sections. Since I only have one ball of yarn wound at this point (need to drag in some unhappy helper to aid me in winding another ball), I decided to just move onto half of Clue 3 instead of cutting the yarn and doing Clue 2 on the other side. It’s looking gorgeous, but I don’t feel yet like taking another photo.

I’ve recently gone on a tea ordering fest! I ordered 5 teas from Adagio - which are soooo wonderful! I ordered just 5 little sample tins, which are each $2, and I’m terribly happy with all of them. Tried the Irish Breakfast tea tonight, which is incredibly yummy. Will have to get more.

By the way, if you’re interested in trying some of Adagio’s teas, let me know, and I’ll send you a $5 gift certificate by email! :) I can give out an unlimited number of these to first-time buyers, so feel free to beg even if I don’t know you. I like to be nice. Honest.

Then I ordered 5 teas from The Tea Table, which is a company in Colorado that produces a billion teas. Huge variety here. They also have free samples - you can order up to 5 with every order (as long as you don’t abuse the system by making multiple small orders to get a billion samples at once), and the samples contain enough tea for around 3 cups! Perfect! From here, I also got some paper filters, and a real “tea spoon” - for measuring the amount of loose tea for a perfect cup. Lovely! I’m happy with their teas, too!

I sent off my YA package, and it’s been recieved by Bev! She tells me she loves it all! I hope she really does. I tried to send her an email saying “you’re welcome” about a dozen times, but it kept coming up with errors for some reason. So I tried sending one to myself, and had the same issue. But the email to myself went through othewise, so I fear she’s gotten about a dozen of the exact same message from me. Eeep.

Other than that, I’ve done very little lately, except begin making wonderful food for myself, like tacos based on a taco bell recipe (very good, if a little spicier than I like), and oh! the best mac n cheese ever. It’s the Down Home Mac and Cheese recipe from All Recipes. Wonderful. The Italian seasoned bread crumbs added a lot! Even A, who hates homemade mac and cheese ( is she crazy? ) loved it.

So I’ve been hearing about sudoku for a while, but except for the fact that it was a grid with some random numbers plugged in, I really had no desire to latch on and see what the fuss was about.

But boredom at work has caused me to relent. It started with an innocent game of crossword. Which I royally suck at. You’d think a genius like me (okay… not /quite/ a genius, you win) - ahem, you’d think an intelligent person like me would do better at crossword puzzles, but I just… don’t. So I vowed (okay, it was a weak vow) to do one a night to, uh, sharpen my drooling brain a bit. I managed to do a fairly easyish one one night in 28 minutes. This was at work, so it wasn’t constant, mind you, but that was a real accomplishment from the 1 hour, 45 minutes I’d been taking. And the cute widdle puzzle even gave me a score: A-. It didn’t really take into consideration my whimsical cheating (where I ran through the entire alphabet until the correct letter turned black) - but it did take points off when I actually went up to the little scorer thing and said “Solve this letter” or even worse “Solve this word”. Needless to say, I know I’m a cheater, and I wasn’t impressed.

But in the middle of crossword irritation, I stumbled upon sudoku and gave it a whirl. I gave up after a good 20 minutes and decided that was way too much for me. Then I felt stupid, so I went back another night, to another site, and tried again.

Then tonight, I really got in my groove. Armed with a couple puzzles that came in the mail with my OneSpirit bookclub newsletter crap, I went to the task with an old fashioned pencil and paper. And was pleased that I could solve them just fine, even in the dead of night when my brain wants to go beddy bye.

I think I’ll be buying me a book of variety puzzles. And maybe a book of sudoku puzzles. They’d be a good addition, once photocopied or cut to size, or whatever, to my nifty new planner I made. Yesindeed.

And it gives me something to do at work. Even better yet.

A meme from 3x Thursday. It deals with work, so I’ll let you in on the secrets of my job…

1. Whether you like it or not, do you take your job and work seriously? Why/why not?

I do take my work seriously. It’s serious work, after all, being a sheriff/911 dispatcher. But… I do work the nightshift. In a very very small town. Face it, it’s dull, boring, and most of the time, I watch tv, knit, and surf the net (and answer memes like this) while I’m at the job. Just not much to do.

2. What’s your work ethic like?

At this job? Crappy, unless something’s actually going on. I can’t say I have much motivation here. Hard to, when 7 out of every 8 hours is spent with nothing to do. Then you get used to it… and don’t want to do some of the boring things like… paperwork.

3. Have you ever been in a managerial position? If so, how is it/was it?

Nope. Never been there. If my boss left (which she’d like to do) I’d instantly be promoted to the TAC (that stands for… uh… I actually have no idea, but it’s basically the top dispatcher.) If only because no one else wants the job. Frankly, I don’t want it, either. I mean… that’s the 8-4 job, which would mean waking up early, and dealing with the public all day, and dealing with the sheriff, and the day deputy (Doug - you will hear about him eventually) - and it’s all phones ringing and stuff. Not much downtime in the daytime. Not much action at night. But I kinda secretly like being lazy. (Secretly? Who are we kidding…)

Bonus Question for Comments: If you could change one policy at your work, what would it be? Why?

That I don’t get a lunch break. Harhar. Actually, no, that wouldn’t be it. The policy I’d change is the fact that those of us in the Sheriff’s Office, though we’re employed by the county and have to follow the county’s handbook… We don’t get to holiday pay for working on Sundays… even though every other county employee does. Why? Well… because we /have/ to work Sundays. And they just don’t want to pay us that much. But you can bet if /they/  had to work Sundays (they being the county commissioners, who are a bunch of *bleepity bleeps*) as a regular, routine part of the job, they’d want holiday pay… Yeah, we kinda get screwed here.

Once, after this handbook came out, I decided to try and collect on that Sunday holiday pay. Didn’t work. They’re like “Sorry, that’s not a holiday…. (for you….)!” Bastards.