I realized I’ve been slacking off in entering money into Where’s George, so I just added the three dollar bills I have in my pocket.

George Harrison died yesterday. It seems sort of unreal - he’s legendary, how can he be dead? I know he’d been ill for quite some time - the throat cancer and all - but it just seems strange that he’s dead.

My boss just said something clever, though I doubt he came up with it. He’d gotten little message clips for all of us - they’re little silver balls with a wire coming up and then an alligator clip at the top to hold notes. We each have two, and I’d put mine on top of my monitor (where I’d kept the eight-inch paperclip-shaped message holder I’d used previously) because that’s the most obvious and accessible place for people to find their messages. They’re cute little clips, though, and it ended up looking like my monitor has antennae. I just brought today’s report into my boss’s office, and saw he’d done the same thing with his pair of clips. At first I thought “copycat!” but I just laughed at it, and he said It’s a good idea, it deserves to be shared. Nice.

Special bonus points - or maybe a few dollars through PayPal - to anyone who can identify what movie this quote is from, and who said it. (Yes, I know the correct answer, I’m asking you! Mom, you’re not eligible because you know what movies are in the basement racks.)
“I must have that collar…I will have that collar!”

Oh my goodness. Now my boss has said something horrific and disgusting and just utterly repulsive. Somebody at the end of the hall was asking if they could get into the men’s bathroom - usually my other boss will lend his key - and my boss said “I don’t know.” What kind of answer is that? So the man said “well do you have a key?” My boss told him rather tersely to go ask up in the lobby. After the guy went away, my boss muttered “Oughta go in there with a cup and cologne and hand out towels for tips.” Holy fuck. Knowing my conservative, Republican, day-trading boss…I just know the poor guy was black or Hispanic or otherwise non-white. That comment has made me ill.

How superb. I had thought I would be running late this morning and expected to barely catch the bus; instead it was several minutes late. I hoped we’d make up the time somewhere and went back to reading Liza Dalby’s The Tale of Murasaki, which I’d just begun. It was a new driver, of course - I’d expected that much - but the trainer (our regular driver, whom I don’t like much but have to admit is reliable) was slouched in her seat, asleep with her mouth gaping open. Suddenly one of the other passengers called out “Hey, you missed your turn!” The trainer woke up and said “oh, yeah!” and the driver finally made a left turn, insisting there would be an outlet. I happened to know that there are no outlets anywhere along there, so I shook my head and the trainer said “she says there’s not.” Sure enough, we came to a cul-de-sac and had to do a three-point turn in this giant bus. We got back on track, and the trainer muttered (she’s never very intelligible) to the driver that he wouldn’t be ready to start the route tomorrow - no kidding! Any hopes of making up time were dashed as every possible stop had someone waiting. We finally made it to the metro station a full ten or fifteen minutes behind schedule; I was really quite disgusted.

I just haven’t been updating this as much as I used to. Anyway, things are going reasonably well. I had my final exam on Monday, and tonight I’ll get back that grade plus my research paper and everything else. My hives have been doing really great, hardly bothering me at all - they’re still around, but only infrequently and only a little bit. The combination of Zantac and Periactin seems to be working.

Oh great, thanks to my boss I’ve given myself the BadTrans worm. Better start cleanup procedures.

Thanksgiving dinner, fortunately, went quite well. We went to my girlfriend’s 18-year-old little sister’s house, where the little sister’s boyfriend ended up doing most of the cooking and hosting. There were twelve people around the dinner table: my girlfriend and myself, my parents, her parents, her little sister and the boyfriend, the boyfriend’s mother, the boyfriend’s sister and her husband, and my girlfriend’s friend whose family lives in Peru. We hadn’t been there long when I realized it was going to be a long evening for me; my parents were very gracious and let me borrow their car so I could run home to get busywork. I brought back a little cross-stitch kit and some crochet but ended up doing the cross-stitch all night. Dinner was quite long, but I made it through okay. I suppose there could have been major family squabbles but everything was fine. Today was like a regular weekend day except that we went bowling tonight with my girlfriend, her little sister, their father, and a friend of the little sister’s who is our friend as well. I did rather horribly, but it was fun.

I am Double Gloucester.

A traditional unpasteurized cheese, made in Gloucestershire since the middle ages. Double Gloucester is a firm, full cream cheese, made with the milk from two milking sessions, hence the name. It has a hard rind, and a rich, buttery taste, and a pale orange colour.

I have been unable to find much of anything about how Lisa Lopes came to know sign language. She’s definitely using it in the TLC video “Unpretty” and she apparently says a bit in sign when they perform the song in concert.
I ordered a Brother PT-65 labeler for work and the mail-in registration card included fax numbers and a website. I bet they get a lot more product registrations than they would without having RegisterMyBrother.com. I imagine other companies would too - people don’t like to mail the cards in, but they don’t mind quickly filling in a little web form. Hell, I did it too.

This morning started out kind of poorly, hopefully today won’t suck all the way through like yesterday did. I suppose I’m kind of a funny girl. I definitely need to start seeing my therapist again; unfortunately my health insurance is going to expire at the end of this year and I don’t have anything else lined up yet.

I got my scores back for the videotape project last night. I earned 18.5 points (out of 25 possible) on the house descriptions and 17.5 points (also out of 25) on the interview portion. Those seem low, but it’s actually a five-point scale: I got mostly 3s, 3.5s, and 4s. A score of 17-25 is “good” so I just squeaked in the “good” range; below that is just “satisfactory.”

I really wish I could go back to school full-time.

Good grief, I’ve already fulfilled most of the requirements for the ASL Paraprofessional Certificate at CUNY-Hunter, which happens to be where my mother went to college. I’ve already finished ASL I and II - I’ll have finished ASL III next week, in fact - and I already took a Deaf Culture class at Western Maryland and I definitely already have the basic computing skills (and the high school diploma and the advanced command of the English language). I could test out of all those, complete the 30 hours of internship work, and that would be that.

Some days just go from bad to worse. Today is one of those days. I have a headache, I keep wanting to cry. It’s one of those days when I’d hurt myself if only I had the guts to do it.

Today I found out that someone on MOO who bugs me also has urticaria. He’s apparently had it since he was 14, and I think he’s something like 25 now - so that’s not good for me. But it’s good to find a common ground with him anyway, it was nice to have a conversation with him that wasn’t irritating.

I just had some miso soup and some hot chocolate; I’m not sure which burned my tongue.

It’s been a mostly uneventful weekend, nothing really remarkable. I have had thoughts tumbling about in my head, but I’m not really sure how to handle them. My friend _D_ was supposed to come over but apparently that’ll have to wait till next weekend.