Well, Shan just left all gussied up for his sorta-interview - he actually had a phone interview, and it went wonderfully, and today is just paperwork and a psych eval, and then he waits for the background check and then - well, I don’t want to jinx it, but I think you get the idea. :D This is so wonderful! It’s work he’ll like, and he won’t have a supervisor standing over his shoulder all day, and it’s totally awesome too. I kinda want to be a girl and brag about what my boyfriend does for a living. XD It’s so cool! I’ll tell ya’ll as soon as I’m not worried about jinxes anymore. Should be about a week.

In the meantime, I have noticed that Vermont has a drawl. Not much of one, but oh lordy, I bet you thought Vermont was cows and sunshine and snow. Oh no. We gots hicks. Actual Vermonters - the ones that stay year-round - are either hippies or hicks. No exceptions. Snowbirds are the rich bitches that only come up when it’s pretty and green and invariably live in Florida the other seven months. Somehow they qualify as residents here, and they control everything. For example! WalMart has been trying to get into St.Albans for decades. The snowbirds and environmentalists have been fighting them, coming up with more and more ridiculous reasons to keep them out. This may not sound like a big deal, and hey, I don’t like WalMart’s business practices either, but they need it up there. It would attract more Canadians, more people north of Burlington, and provide a way to buy clothing that does not involve a half hour of driving. The elderly cannot get their own clothes, and for those without a support network, what can they do? The benefit a big store like WalMart could give is far greater than any negative, and they have addressed all of the relevant concerns. The nutjobs just don’t care. You see, it will make Saint Albans less scenic. Ah yes, preserving the view, and the only cost is the quality of life of the people that actually live there.

But anyway. Vermont has its own accent, and I’ve picked it up. But I still say “water bubbler”, New Hampshire! I am still your child! No one ever knows what a water bubbler is outside of my hometown. Seriously.

I decided to find some pictures of some of the machines I work with. The big, scary lathe that tried to slice my wrist open Friday was not to be found (I can’t remember the brand name, which is funny because all the machines are named specifically) but most of the others were pretty easy. I tried to get pictures that give a sense of scale, and I can even tell you a little about them! The Haas is a 4-axis CNC milling machine, the Cobra is a 2-axis CNC, and the rest aren’t interesting. A hobo could live in the Haas. Several hobos, if they were adventurous. Hell, I could live in there. It is a huge effing machine. To get at the parts, it brings the table to the door and I still have to nearly crawl inside. To clean the tops of the doors, I need a stool, and even then I can’t reach the corners. Huge. I’ve had it running while Maintenance climbed on top to reach the ceiling. Seriously. Huge. I could never hope to program it, and half the time I am reduced to saying, “Hey, that thing that sticks up there is dull - well, no, the blade-thing on the thing that sticks - you know what, come here and I’ll point at it.” The noises it makes are incredible, even with earplugs stuck up halfway to my eardrums, but I’m pretty much done being scared of it. I can make it do things, like move the table and let go of the drills/milling things and turn on the corkscrew that takes out the shavings and chips. That’s, uh, pretty much it. I hate dropping things in the back, though. Have to go around, get the long tongs, open up the side window, and basically crawl inside while not letting the boss see because he’d have a fit but man, I am too short for this shit. Huge machine. Awesome, and huge.

Shan’s Amada is also huge, and the heaviest machine in the building. He says there’s a seperate concrete pour under it, because it’s so heavy it cracked the original pour. They had to make a deeper block for it to sit on. We’re not sure what the oldest machine is, because that’s going back 40-50 years, but the biggest is the plating department. We use open vats of boiling chemicals, which is awesome, and racks of parts get lifted in by this crane system. The head honchos refuse to put in copper ingots. They would make everything completely rust-proof, you see, and then no one would come back to buy more from us. Ah, corporate.

The machines use a mostly-water lubricant, which you can see spraying in the close-up of the Haas in action. It’s 96% water and 4% some kinda hydrocarbon, like Vaseline or something. I forget exactly. But it’s not the best stuff to get in a cut, and so of course it gets in all your cuts. I banged my wrist on a shield on a lathe yesterday - it was a rounded edge, but it was a shield someone made in-shop, so it wasn’t exactly smooth, and I’ve got a shallow cut an inch and a half long just under my thumb. Not a big deal, barely even bled, but oh how it stung. I always know how bad the lubricant got in by how red the cut is. Don’t worry, I washed it a bunch and it’s healing fine. What bothers me more is that one hand (just one!) reacts badly to the lubricant, dries up and cracks a million ways to Sunday, so I have to wear gloves. I’m the only one in the machine shop that does. I generally don’t if the part is clamped in such a way that it mostly drains, or if I’m just going to get bits of metal all over me instead of lubricant, but if that thing is sopping when it comes out, out come the gloves. Such a sissy sometimes.

I will be so glad to kiss this job goodbye.

Good things are happening, I think. This is a time for change. I’m so excited, and so happy, and things look so perfect and bright I can barely believe it’s real.

I’m crunching numbers, getting used to the idea, and it’s just incredible. You were right, Dad. Dreams come true if you just make it happen.

Hell, maybe I’ll work on a book, see if I can get some free money. It’s just that kind of a season.

Before I even got out of bed I wanted to stay home, and then I got up and puked up bile, so. A day off. I can afford it, too, which is awesome. Now that I feel a bit better (I feel alright after sleeping an extra four hours, hee) I can get some cleaning done, I guess. Home sick days are not for having fun. D: Dad taught me that, and I was always horrified when my sisters (step-sisters, I guess, if this story is gonna make sense) were allowed to do whatever they wanted when they stayed home. Watch TV, go out and play, invite people over - anything, as long as they whined long enough. I, on the other hand, had been taught that home sick meant “lie in bed, drink OJ, and sleep until you get better.” That’s it. No getting up for anything other than medicine and bathroom. I think this is the responsible way of teaching your children what “sick” means, and for some reason, even after Dad relented and said I could do other stuff when I was sick (my sisters do! It’s not faaaaair Dad!) I still pretty much just stayed in bed and drank OJ.

I was home sick when the towers fell. I don’t think I will ever forget that. I still get shook up over it, and I know that’s more than a little weird, because watching it on TV is the most it’s affected me, barring the war and removal of most constitutional rights. I still can’t watch clips of it without choking back tears, and every time I see it I think, “Why are they showing it so soon? Don’t they have and decency?” And then I realize it’s been years.

Gotta go to school tonight. I should, uh, research my paper. It’s about how feral children demonstrate learned behaviors, or something. Poor Genie had to be taught how to chew. I wanna see if I can score some video of that one girl that was raised by dogs, too.

Pulled a bunch of grape vines down today. I know, I know, grapes, but they were killing Shan’s sister’s lilacs and she wanted them gone. It was fun, crawling under there and mumbling to myself about creepers. They’ve been going at them from the top down, which is all wrong. It’s not the leaves you want, it’s the damn roots. :D So anything going horizontal at ground level got pulled, pretty much. So fun! I was wearing a skirt, though, and it’s on this cliff. Seriously, that is one vertical embankment. So the combination is kinda awkward.
It has been pointed out to me that I’m kinda butch. And…  yeah. That’s not really a bad thing, I guess, just annoying sometimes. Makes it hard to interact with anyone. No, seriously. I get along pretty well with the guys at work, now that they’ve figured out I am a peculiar combination of masculine and feminine. I act like a guy, but my strength is that of a little girl. D: No torque, man. But if I set out to get something done, it’s gonna happen. So pulling up creepers by the roots in ten-foot segments all afternoon? Totally awesome. XD I also read a camping/RV magazine and thought longingly of Dad’s camper. There are nice couches in there for $90, Dad, if you want me to find out the catalogue. Pretty cheap, if you ask me. And brown/beige instead of that fugly old-lady blue. D:
Ah, I keep forgetting - dearest Uncle, I did get the check, thank you! All is set until Spring semester. :D I wonder if Little Sis got my card. If not, that sucks, and I’m not sending her another hundred. She was lucky to get it in the first place, since I really couldn’t afford it at the time.

So the other day I sat down for break with Shan and said, “Man, today is going by fast.” I opened my lunch box, took out my food, took a bite, looked up and said, “Man, today is going by fast.”

I’m terrified of losing my memory like Grandma did. I have so many problems remembering things even now. It runs in the family, sure, there are ways to cope with it - but I don’t want to. I want to know when it gets worse. So, to help get my brain working again, I picked up Myst IV once more. Lost the save file like last year, haven’t played it since, so I had to start a new game. The hardest part so far is finding the third generator in Spire, goddamn the place. I’ve beat this place once, I can do it again, grr. Then I go to Serena, which is easy until I get to the timed light puzzle, which I can intuit if I sit there long enough. I intuit a lot of the puzzles that aren’t “go here and flip a switch and then here and poke a fish and then here and feed a monkey and then match the designs to open the gate!” but rather “press one button, and the ones around it turn red, unless they’re already red in which case they turn back, and only red the ones with the laser on them.” The timed light puzzle, just so you know, is of a similar variety. Except instead of turning red, they go through a cycle of five colors, and you have to turn all of them the same color, and you can’t click the same one twice in a row, and you have to move consecutively, and if you take too long it randomly resets. One time I was one light away from getting it and it reset. RARGH. Anyway, I do like those puzzles. I used to do the door puzzles in Fatal Fame for Steph. :D Only part of the game I can stand to play, actually. Too scary.

Myst is so beautiful. This game has a camera feature, so you can recall papers and such you’ve seen, and I take a lot of pictures of animals. In this one Age, the whole thing is focused on animals, and there’s a lot of skeletons and interesting behavior and man, I wish I had designed those things. The fin/flipper on those bird things! Man! Like a hinged coccyx. So perfect. And they dive so pretty, and man, the one that landed right in front of me and ate the fish! Eee! ♥ Also, I love the characters. In Myst I, they were a little one-dimensional, but now - man. It’s like meeting an old family friend. Such good games. I can’t believe I haven’t even played Myst V yet! Uncle George gave me that one, I think, either that or IV - either way, man, I can’t wait to beat them.

I didn’t miss anything by missing the first Psych class. Seriously. Most of the second class, we watched Star Trek. I’m so not kidding. It was great, until that one freaky girl opened her mouth. She can’t talk, just stammers and speaks in half-sentences, and instead of making her point and shutting up, she just keeps going and going. The teacher refuses to be “rude” and cut her off, which would you know give time to teach the class, and I am seriously just a hair away from interrupting her myself. “Get your point out and SHUT UP. I don’t care if you’re mentally disabled, I don’t care if you stutter for five minutes getting there - just stop wasting my very expensive time with stories about this one Star Trek episode with giant cats. NO ONE CARES. SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

I make myself sound very harsh sometimes, but seriously, I find that brain-damaged people are generally really nice to hang out with. They may be inept, drooling, and can’t speak clearly or in sentences, but the ones I hang with are bright, and I never interrupt them when they’re having issues speaking, and they’re fucking honest. And that is what I care about in a human being: honesty. There’s this guy at work with a hole in his skull, and he’s great. He’s nice, and he says exactly what he thinks about someone to their face, and he gives hugs without being creepy. He found out I like nickel drippings from the plating line, and he’ll hang onto a bunch of nice ones to give to me. He’s smarter than people give him credit for, and they’d know that if they talked to him for more than twenty seconds, but everyone sees the dent in his head and starts talking loud and simple at him. He’s ignoring you because you’re a twat, you idiot, not because he’s deaf or dumb.

This is getting ridiculous - last night I slept through a fire. In our building. D: Nothing’s hurt, it was out before the fire department got here, but I never. Woke. Up. Shan got up, got dressed, met the neighbors, made sure we didn’t need to evacuate, and I slept. Quite well, even. Woke up at something like 4:30, though. Bleh. At least Boss wasn’t really at work, which was awesome. Hee!

Got class tonight! <3 I, ah, forgot to read the chapters, but I’ve got some time before class, and they’re just basic stuff anyway. Chemistry of the brain, how to research, that stuff. I could bullshit it, I’m sure. Maybe. Depends on how in-depth it is. Anyway! Time to get ready, so I can go in early and figure out where my class is.

OH MY GOSH I COOKED. I made salmon soup! And it’s not only edible, it’s good! I was gonna take a picture to prove it’s lovely too, but the camera doesn’t like any of our batteries right now. It happens. They’re all old rechargeables. But oh, the broth in this soup! Mmmm. I got the recipe here, although that one is much nicer looking than mine, and I forgot to buy olive oil. Whoops! Shan won’t eat fish most of the time, so to make up for cooking a meal he won’t eat I got him an apple (to spec - no bruises anywhere or other imperfections) and an orange, and a big ol’ bottle of Heineken. The co-op carries these bottles that are like, 2.5 pints or something. Insanely huge. He does not drive after one of those. D:

Make sure to read the last entry from this morning! I linked to pretty photos. You must go look and tell me how pretty they are. :D (Also, I got more cleaning done. Dishes are still waiting, but trash is gone, and - god this broth is good. The rest of the soup is tolerable, but oh, this broth. Heaven.

I’ve been taking pictures around town, mostly of odd places that strike my fancy. There are a few that just make me gape, though - how did I take such a lovely picture? Particularly the ones from the beach. Dad, I think you’d be proud of those sky pictures. Most of those images full-size to 1000px wide (or tall, if it’s a vertical image) but some are 1600×1200, which is wallpaper size for me. I think today will be dedicated to resizing things and cleaning, both the computer and the house.

Okay, computer cleaning done, clothes put away - now to do dishes and take out the trash. And possibly do a backup and repartition, if Shan is up to it, or maybe just reinstall Myst IV. I can’t believe I haven’t finished it yet.