All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

Unemployment: Week 1

Life

In which I ramble on about nothing.

I stayed out all night last Wednesday playing a silly drinking game called Beirut with beer, ping pong balls, and three awesome people.

Friday morning’s yoga class was awesome but left me sore for two entire days. No more classes until the middle of January, sadly.

I sold my old cell phone and gave the resulting $15 to my unemployed brother, who had originally purchased the phone as a gift for me a couple of years ago.

I mailed my present for Josh’s awesome gift exchange at the Very Last Moment.

I’ve slogged through binary math and two chapters of the CCENT/CCNA ICND1 Official Exam Certification Guide.

I received my present from Josh’s awesome gift exchange. It was from Adam and it was ZOMBIES! And a Sensitivity Consultant! I love them.

I gigged Friday and Saturday nights in the Tricities. Not only was it totally fun, but I made two hundred bucks so I bought myself a Kindle! Probably not the smartest thing to do while unemployed, but it’s Christmas and I’d been planning a big electronics purchase for months. (Did you know that Fictionwise is currently selling no fewer than three different electronic ebook readers? None are wireless, though.) I just hope I don’t end up wishing I’d upgraded my iPod instead.

I spent well over an hour at decalgirl.com surfing Kindle skins. And LG Lotus skins. And Eee PC skins. And iPod Touch skins.

I got all my Xmas stuff wrapped and put under the tree:

Xmas Tree 2009

(I have only three Christmas gifts yet to obtain. They’ll probably be gift cards: lamesauce but easy.)

I need to go to the post office and ship a couple of boxes this afternoon. I also really need a manicure because it’s been a month and my nails are all sorts of screwed up-looking.

I have applied to two jobs since I was laid off. I haven’t been able to file for benefits yet because the Job Seekers site is “experiencing high volumes” and/or the back end totally shat the bed (there were “database is missing” errors late last night when I tried to file online), but I have until Friday. One has already called me back for a phone interview. I don’t really want to get a job quite yet; I’d like to take a month or two off and finish my CCNA before going back to work full time.

Happy Christmas/pagan holiday/solstice week, my babies!

That is all.

Loss of: job, vehicular mobility, and Xmarks.

Work

In which I’m not really having a very good day.

I got a heads-up yesterday that I was going to be laid off today so I did the right thing last night and cleaned up my work computer, uninstalling silly applications and clearing browser caches and passwords and blah blah blah.

Today I went in to the office at nine o’clock to sign the paperwork. The drive was ultra treacherous because of the freezing rain and snow. (Yes, you read that right: I got up early to lose my job and went to do it even though all the schools are closed due to the shitty weather. Bah humbug.)

Freezing Rain

I was given a week’s severance, which I hadn’t expected since I was only there for four months. They were really nice and apologized for downsizing. Eight minutes later I was walking out the door with some COBRA paperwork and my trackball mouse in my hand.

The truck was stuck. I rocked it, but it was sitting on a sheet of ice and wouldn’t go anywhere.

The guy they laid off right after me had a 4WD, though, and was awesome enough to tow me onto blacktop. I drove home gingerly, put the truck in the damn garage, and walked to the store on ice because I wanted a fucking consolation latte but wasn’t willing to get the truck stuck again just to get one. (Have I mentioned that 1. Walla Walla doesn’t plow, and 2. THE FREEZING FUCKING RAIN?!?)

When I finally got home, I made Vegetarian White Trash Breakfast from Hell and a cardamom latte. Then I came upstairs to study base 2 a little more, but when I went to click on the tutorial link I noticed my toolbar was empty.

Yes, last night, Xmarks somehow synched with the server AFTER I deleted all my local shortcuts and CLEARED ABOUT FIVE YEARS’ WORTH OF FUCKING BOOKMARKS. I’m really smoking pissed off about it, too, because I don’t have a local backup any more (which is my own fault, I know).

I did everything in the correct order, too (I’m not an idiot luser, I do this shit FOR A LIVING) and Xmarks fucked up anyway: I uninstalled Xmarks for IE, then deleted my IE Favorites. Then I deactivated Xmarks in Firefox, then deleted my shortcuts. When I closed Firefox, it asked me if I wanted to sync my changes AND I CHOSE NO! It apparently synced anyway, for fuck’s sake, and now I have NONE, ZERO, ZIP, ZILCH of my 500+ saved and carefully organized fucking bookmarks.

Of course, because I’m a geek I was able to restore using these directions (once I cooled down enough to look for them) but my newest links are lost and I was really, truly smokin’ mad there for awhile.

Happy holidays!

Facebook support.

Work

In which I totally don’t even work for Facebook, but you’d never know it by listening in on my calls.

Me: …this is Michelle, how may I help you?
Caller: Is there something wrong with your network in Idaho?
Me: No sir, there are no current known service outages. What symptoms are you experiencing?
Caller: I keep getting blank pages in Facebook.
Me: The problem is specific to Facebook?!
Caller: It’s just not working right.
Me: You’re able to view other web pages, and send and receive email though, right?
Caller: Oh, yeah, everything else works just fine. It’s just this Facebook application called FarmVille that —
Me: –Facebook has been having problems for days. They were all the way down yesterday for awhile. Also, when you attempt to login to FarmVille, you’ll see a notification inviting you to play at farmville.com if you’re having problems playing through Facebook! This has nothing to do with our network!
Caller: Really? No kidding. That’s, like, wow. You’ve been really helpful!
Me: Oh, my pleasure. For real. Have a great evening.

Teh tech support, it rulez.

It's Sunday, and there are two things.

Work

In which I’m suddenly considering where I might be living next Spring.

1. Dear Walla Walla: It snowed. YESTERDAY. And today, the streets are still full of snow! Why don’t you plow when it snows? What the hell is wrong with you?!

2. For reasons I haven’t been working here long enough to understand but which may be political as much as financial, it appears that I’m likely to get laid off this week. I will probably spend the winter holed up in the attic, hoarding UI benefits and getting my certs.

Apparently all the tech jobs have migrated to Denver. I don’t really want to move there, but there sure as hell isn’t any decent work here. I checked tech jobs in New York (of course), but they all seem to want a year’s worth of experience administering freakin’ Blackberry Enterprise. *shudder* Get thee behind me, Microsoft Exchange Server and derivatives!

There is a very cool-sounding support gig currently open in Chelsea, though, and a couple others in Brooklyn I’m qualified for…

Birthrates. Scripture. Religion. Population.

Soapbox

In which I spend a lot of time online, reading stuff. And then I write about it!

It’s important that we all become aware of, and defend against, the “natural family revival.”

There are some batshit crazy Xians out there, and they’re all banding together – some even with (gasp!) Muslims – to bring back the “natural family” (patriarch, baby machine wife, and offspring only: no non-traditional family structures allowed) because it’s the ‘natural basis of society’ and its loss is directly responsible for all kinds of terrible moral degradation.

They dislike the rights individuals within families have been slowly accumulating in the past few generations, and are, essentially, against women’s or children’s rights where they conflict with the family’s (read patriarch’s, I assume) goals.

Scripture

According to this article at The Nation, this coalition wants to increase birthrates. (Well, white birthrates.) How they rationalize this in terms of the earth’s available resources, I don’t know, but they’re really taking the old biblical injunction to multiply very seriously.

They’re even making movies about it. Behold the pseudo-science of Demographic Winter:

The bottom line, essentially, is that heathen brown people are breeding too fast and we gotta keep up in order to preserve our way of life, and our women had best be making babies, and don’t even start on the whole gay thing, please, and the best way to do that is to keep girls out of higher learning and build a culture that celebrates their womanly duties: pregnancy, lactation, and, one assumes, cooking.

Due Diligence

Because I believe that most people are essentially good and that no one is really that crazy, I went and found a rebuttal to the Joyce article.

The author claims that global birthrates are falling alarmingly and that we’re going to run out of people to drive the trains by 2050.

Really? Is that true? Are birth rates really that low? Is contraception and abortion really that common?

I googled ‘birthrates worldwide’ and as far as I can tell, yeah, birth rates are dropping from where they have been, but world population is still increasing and there are no serious trends indicating that it will stop.

In fact, the Wikipedia article linked above states that the world’s population increased by 220,980 people every day in 2009, and that only one of the UN’s multiple estimates indicate a growth rate of zero:

“In 2006, the United Nations stated that the rate of population growth is diminishing due to the demographic transition. If this trend continues, the rate of growth may diminish to zero, concurrent with a world population plateau of 9.2 billion, in 2050. However, this is only one of many estimates published by the UN. In 2009, UN projections for 2050 range from about 8 billion to 10.5 billion.”

I’m religious. I believe in God. I even pray. I understand from experience how a person can believe in and even fight for something they don’t understand: I’ve heard my own Guru speak against the genetic engineering of food crops, and I’m inclined (although I haven’t sided yet) to be against it too even though I don’t know why. (When people are starving it’s hard to be against a strain of rice that produces in difficult conditions; it just is.) But I cannot understand how an otherwise rational person can possibly move forward with a “go forth and multiply” world view just because it’s in the Bible: the world simply cannot sustain 1960s-level birthrates infinitely. It just can’t.

Which indicates a whole ‘nother motivation for the “natural family revival,” and that freaks me right the hell out.

Population

The research seems to show that poor and uneducated people have more children. (They also lose more children so birth rates don’t necessarily equal population.) When people get access to education, they quit having as many children. And very educated, urban people tend to drop the birthrate to less-than-replacement levels.

Maybe that’s the plan, huh? When you get a bunch of us all together thinking about stuff, we stop breeding like animals and start acting more… human?

Jesus was way cool. Religion is good. The Old Testament is a lovely historical document. I think it’ll be awesome when the world’s all brown. Because seriously: white people just don’t look that cool in comparison.

Perhaps I'm a little butch.

Blurbs

In which we use an AI to analyze my writing.

I went to genderanalyzer.com and typed in my URL and clicked the Analyze button and waited patiently. It said, “We think http://goblinbox.com is written by a woman (67%).”

Only sixty-seven percent?

Hmm.

Cheesy artisanal cheese.

Blurbs

In which I think “artisanal” is a wholly silly word.

Once upon a time, everybody made their own breads and cheeses (or at least personally knew the person who made the breads and cheeses they ate), and I imagine these products were earthy and rustic and “artisanal” and at least edible if not actually delicious. Yay.

Then came the Industrial Revolution and specialization and factories, and cheap, plentiful, uniform breads and cheeses came to be, and there was much rejoicing because making bread every goddamned week probably got really old and anyone who has ever been around homemade cheese-making knows it’s totally smelly and that’s even when you don’t actually own the cows and/or goats the milk came from.

Today when I walked from work down to the post office to see if I’d gotten anything interesting in the mail I passed all these cute little stores packed with “artisanal” breads and cheeses and salamis and olives and things, and it struck me as being kinda funny that we now go out of our way to buy bumpy, floury, expensive, stinky foods, and that it’s a sign of affluence to have the time and money to be able to pay top dollar for the fruits of peasants’ labor.

It may be that our great-great-great grandmothers wish they could reincorporate just long enough to smack us upside our trendy little heads.

Random blog post title.

Life

In which if you want more ammunition to use against me in our upcoming argument about what a dork I am, here it is!

Winter

It’s 14°F. I am seriously NOT DIGGING IT.

Bindu isn’t digging it, either: she was right up on my right heel most of the way around the block this morning, choosing to hurry rather than sniff every single possible location of dog pee.

Xmas

I have less than half of my gift shopping done. I have no wrapping done. I have not mailed my gift exchange package. I have not put up my little string of Christmas lights around the window in my bedroom.

I am feeling a little bit behind on the whole thing.

Twitter

Most of my social life takes place on Twitter. I admit it: I love Twitter.

Someone called @SexToySean is now following me, and his icon is a picture of a confusing and possibly terrifying dildo with a feathery-looking appendage I would want nowhere near any body part featuring a high density of nerve endings.

Language

Thanks to my ol’ buddy Buzz, I now have a Rosetta Stone disc. Let’s see if I learn some French!

The Economy

I was all bummed at my last job because I kept expecting the place to close down on me any day but they didn’t and I was lucky enough to be able to change jobs.

….aaaaaaaaand now my new job has let two people go in the past month. I have no idea if my job’s in danger or if they’re just pruning, but, well, yeah.

Cursing

Cursing is becoming utterly commonplace. I curse at work. I curse online. I even came across a tag at respected online mag Wired.com featuring the word “bullshit” right in it.

I should probably be worried that cursing is taking over the adjective’s rightful place in language, but it’s just so fucking fun to swear all the time.

My Lunch

Yes, my lunch! You know you wanna see it. And here it is!:

Bento #167: Noodles

Monday is my Tuesday.

Life

In which ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS.

Okay, so, like, last night at work it was all exciting because there was an HVAC crisis in a server room in Spokane. I had to talk with three engineers over IM and dispatch an HVAC guy and everything. Whee!

Then I went home. I did not have dinner. I did not watch a movie. I SLEPT FOR ELEVEN HOURS.

Then I got up, had breakfast, made lunch, and came back to work.

Bento #166: Noodles

Rockstarishness! With a side of quasi-idiot.

Music, Social

In which I have a fairly rotten cold. And a lot of fun, too, but the fun sure ain’t helping my cold any.

Thursday, I was pretty much wrecked at work because I’d decided to party the night before, but it turns out that I’m actually even better at phone-based IT work when I’m exhausted: it makes me talk – and think – more slowly and most customers really respond well to me when I’m half crippled.

The Dog Park and Two Bars

Friday, Bindu and I went to the dog park with our new friends J– and Turbo. Here is a fuzzy picture of Bindu and a couple of random Labs:

Dog park!

I met the cutest two-year-old English bulldog bitch in the entire world. The thing was built like a flat-faced toad, was totally friendly, and had the most hilarious underbite ever. I laughed every time she looked at me.

After that, J– and I went to the pub and had sweet potato fries (after intense deliberation I have decided that I do not like them) and built this awesome fire and talked our faces off and OMFG ARE WE HILARIOUS:

We built this fire on rock 'n' roll

Then we went to the Red Monkey and hung out with Becca and Adam. I took this picture of my drinkin’ buddies shortly after we’d entered the “You are so cool, I fuckin’ love you, man!” phase of our evening:

James and Adam

We went to after hours at J–‘s house on Stateline when the bar closed. I slept on the couch; J– slept on the floor because some other dude had passed out in his bed.

Around eleven the next morning I went home and slept in my own bed until I had to get ready for the gig. I coughed for, oh, about three hours straight. Stupid cold. Stupid girl who stays out all night with a cold!

The Gig!

Saturday night was the Mega Jam Blues Slam at the Kennewick Jack*son’s:
Mega Jam Blues Slam

There were four bands. The Coyote Kings went on second; I fronted their last 3 songs for them. I had the dance floor COMPLETELY PACKED while I was onstage, and did a little “Lemmie get a hell yeah!” “HELL YEAH!” thing with the audience that really amused me. The crowd was really superlative and the joint was packed. This pic was taken while we performed a cover of Delbert Mcclinton’s Shaky Ground:

prs

I’ve been coughing my face off for a week now, so I’m relieved I only did a few songs; I don’t think the voice would have lasted much longer than that.

Walking around the venue after getting off stage was fun because most of the people in the crowd were blues society members; one entire table actually started clapping when I walked by, and a couple other people just full-on hugged me. I gave out a lot of business cards and decided that I need to buy one of these and get a bunch of old live cassette tape recordings into MP3 format so people can have more free downloads.

There was supposed to be a jam at the end of the evening, but there were two more bands doing sets after ours and most of the Kings just didn’t want to hang out. Since Becca and I had ridden to Kennewick with Rocket and S–, we went with them over to cute little biker bar Dax’s in Richland and listened to a set from the Seattle rockabilly band, Guns n Rosetti. Then we went home because no one – the bass player, the drummer, myself – was really interested in going all the way back over for the jam… I wanted to go, sure, but mainly I was congested and tired and needed to go home to bed since I had to work the next day.

Sundays are mellow.

That next day is today. I’m at work. The volume is really low and frankly I’m wondering if I’m going to get rescheduled or simply laid off or what. Anyway. Behold the office Xmas tree:

Xmas tree

I wish I could get sushi for lunch, but I think they’re closed on Sundays.

There’s something deeply satisfying about just getting drunk with people and hanging out; my only regret is that this week’s opportunity to do so coincided with so much snot. Snot, snot, snot. I’m snot-locked.

In other words, I’ve had a lot of fun. But I also have a deep, wracking cough that probably wouldn’t sound like this if I’d not done the drinking/smoking/standing outside in the cold/staying up all night bit. I believe that barring a call from Mick Jagger wanting to party on his Lear jet I’ll just go ahead and take the next week off and act like a mundane: bed rest, herbal tea, dog cuddles, and no staying up all night again until the cough is gone.