one day i am going to grow wings

Anyways, today I called work and asked for some pre-shift lowcall since it's always slow on Wednesdays. Apparently, it was so slow that they offered me as much lowcall as I wanted, including the whole day off. I was stupid good and just took a few hours. When I got there at five, they had lowcalled almost everyone else out of there. Somehow I don't think we're going to make it till April.

I went to the bookstore and found the gayest painting of Jesus that I've ever seen.
( cut for Gay Jesus picture and general blasphemy )

So many people have quit work that the weekdays are pretty busy now. Customers continue to be aggravating. Yesterday, I told a guy to google a hotel if he wanted more information and he asked me to spell google for him. Perhaps I should have spelled justfuckinggoogleit.com instead. Also, some other guy called me an Okie hick after he asked where my call center was. What a douche. Now, I realize he was just trying to be funny. He just failed miserably. (I always groan inwardly when the agents transferring the calls say something like, "Oh, he's a character", "a cool guy" or crap like that because it usually translates to "pain in ass.") Whatever. He was from Minnesota, of all places. Not exactly the most posh accent either, asshole.

I'm almost looking forward to the possible layoff, just to break up the monotony.

In other news . . .
I'm really, really enjoying the online Dracula read along. Reading it from the lj friends' list makes it creepy and seem more real. The discussion in the comments section has been enlightening as well. It's difficult to read the Jonathan Harker entries and not hear Keanu Reeves' voice, though.

Was surprised to see that Placebo has a new album out. Why Amazon spams me about crap I don't listen to and never notifies me about bands whose cds I have bought before, I do not understand. Must chalk it up to suckage. Anyway, I'm enjoying the album so far, although Placebo seems to be continuing their trend of really ugly cover art.

Off to go watch Derailed. . .

Here's a picture of my latest finished cross stitch piece. . .



It's a design by Little House Needleworks called "The Bookshelf". (Sorry about the dimness and camera glare. It was hard to get a good shot of it.) It took about 2 months(? or so) to do. I'm relatively pleased with how it came out. The bottom right corner was supposed to be Wuthering Heights, but I switched it to Jane Eyre and the house became Thornfield Hall instead. I had to take out the trees to make room for the flames, but I let the unconcerned sheep graze where it was. It's probably thinking, "Ah, let the fucker burn. Mmm, grass."

In other news, work continues to kill my soul. If it weren't for the customers, it would otherwise be a great job. With this job, I went from face-to-face customer service to not having to look at them (since it's over the phone.) Now if I could just move to not having to hear their actual voices, I think I'd be okay.

The season (series?) finale of Arrested Development was on tonight. *sigh* I'm going to miss that show. So, so funny. I made my mom watch it and in the course of an hour, she went from, "This is stupid" to "Why the hell are they cancelling this?" See? See? Stupid Fox tv, you ruin all good things. They showed some previews for their new comedy shows and they looked shitty. You couldn't leave a perfectly good schedule alone, could you, Fox? Damn your eyes.

Shiny, happy meme

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At work: Please make the calls stop, customers are giving me Teh Dumb :(

Not only have I found a boot of Rufus singing "Between My Legs", I found one that was recorded at the Tulsa show I went to. Woohoo! Here is a link if anyone is interested; it is halfway down the page. Bless you, bootleggers!

In other news, work still sucks. It's kind of surprising how many people you can confuse by telling them their flight leaves at 12pm and they're like, "Midnight? I don't want to leave at midnight!" Nooooo. Um, that's not it. Another customer was interrupted by his wife about five times because he was spelling his name to me and she kept trying to correct him, incorrectly. Finally, he asked me to hold and I could hear him asking her, "Barbara, do you know how to spell your last name?" (I didn't hear the rest of what they said because I was laughing at them. On mute, of course.)

Also, fucking mosquitos! Die! *completely driven to distraction*

*eta: Mission accomplished. One less pest to worry about.

Today, one of my coworkers told me, "Is it odd for an agnostic to tell an atheist 'bless you'in German after they sneeze?"

"Well, I believe in manners," I said. I didn't think it was that strange.

2.5 hours of OT next week, Brenn! :P So sick of this place! At least the internet is mostly up again.

The Evil Corporate Entity is such a cocktease. They have a tendency to block websites, but they're so erratic about it, that you never know what's going to be available when. One day, they may decide to block any game websites or, as it has been recently, they may allow them for weeks at a time. Unfortunately it looks like they've decided to crack down harder than usual and they're not allowing anything except for news sites like CNN. Not even harmless websites like Ebay or Amazon. I can't even check my email. Even worse, they've discovered my little secret weapon of using web proxies to sneak past their web blocks. Bastards! All is lost!

As a result, I did a lot of cross stitch today. But still very grouchy.

Anyway, here are my books for April. This was a really good month, book-wise.

The Dark Queen - Susan Carrol. Three witch sisters (or healers, that is) try to foil the evil machinations of Catherine de Medici. This was suspiciously romance novel like. And yet, I get the feeling that I'm going to end up reading each book (it's apparently going to be a trilogy) when they come out.

The Grim Grotto - Lemony Snicket. I like how each book reveals a tiny bit of secrets at a time. Totally hooked now. The next book comes out in October. October!

The Secret History - Donna Tartt. I picked this up at a ginormous used bookstore in Tulsa several months ago and didn't get around to reading it until now. I really liked it. An excellent psychological thriller. Almost makes me wish I studied Classics in school.

Assassination Vacation - Sarah Vowell. The newest book by one of my favorite non-fiction writers. It's about the first three Presidential assassinations: Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley and Vowell basically travelling around the country, dragging along friends and family members to look at historic plaques and artifacts. She's a very amusing writer and I would especially recommend any of her books.

Piratica - Tanith Lee. Another really good book. Lee is excellent at writing children's novels and really, you can't go wrong with pirates.

Tales from Watership Down - Richard Adams. mythicalgryphon lent this to me last year and I finally got around to reading it. Very good continuation of the story. Not quite as enthralling as the novel, but it was good to revisit the characters and read more about them.

Wolf Tower - Tanith Lee. Another YA book by Lee and yet another series, I will have to read all of. But of the two, Piratica is definitely the one I'd recommend first.

The Vanished Child - Sarah Smith. (reread). I've reread this one several times. It's a mystery set around 1902 in New England, about an Austrian baron who gets mistaken for a child who was mysteriously kidnapped 20 years previously.

Finally a good day at work! It started out very blah, as it was a very busy Saturday, but it turned out that only one of the three closers showed up. To prevent Brenda from working 4 1/2 hours by herself, I offered to do a split shift. So I got to leave when it was relatively busy, go get a nice lunch and take a nap, then come back when it was very dead. Even more ironic, workforce overcorrected itself and had Brenn take her lunch earlier, thus leaving only one agent on the phone at the busiest point in the evening. I'm wondering if they're going to catch onto that.

For lunch, I went to a place called Cafe Bella over on Penn and had a really nice tortellini alfredo soup in a bread bowl and a nice tall cup of jasmine green tea. The soup was so good and the cafe itself had a really relaxing atmosphere. I think I'll definitely have to go again.

This week, in the continuing effort to learn to cook, I made asparagus brie quesadillas. Very simple to make and quite good. This was the first time I've tried brie; it was so good. (Unfortunately, I used up all I had making the quesadillas.) I am so hungry for more. Actually, I think at this point, I'm hungry for any kind of really nice cheese. Like maybe some camembert with a really crunchy French baguette. Or a goat cheese pizza with smoked salmon. Unfortunately, it is too late at night for any of those things. Wah.

I wonder what the odds are of tomorrow going as well as today. Slim.