I have a totally awesome friend, and her name is Colleen. She is nice, sweet, funny, crazy, intelligent, mature, and delightful. I met her back in August when school started, but today she became my official co-worker in the VRS center. She’s staying on campus over the summer, so we will get to hang out a lot! She’s going away for 10 days, though - she flew out tonight. She was very kind and gave me her Wii to play with meanwhile! I had bought her Endless Ocean as a gift, but partly because I knew she’d let me play it! So I expect to make great leaps and advances in the game. And for that reason, I will keep this entry short, and bid the computer good night so I can turn on the Wii.

Oh hai! Here I am. Does anybody notice when I don’t post for four days in a row? Anyway, I’m done with school for the semester!! Only two of my grades are in, but they are both A’s - Deaf Studies, and Sex & Gender. kawaiibishounen already got his linguistics grade, so I am frantically checking the online system for mine, but it’s still not there! I only just had the history final exam today, so I don’t expect that grade tonight. Grades are due by Monday at noon, though, so hopefully I’ll have them by then!

Not a whole lot has been going on. I’m hoping to organize my workdays so that I’ll be working 10-1 and 2-5, though I’m not sure they’ll go for that…it’s basically because a 30-minute lunch break isn’t enough for me, emotionally or physically. We only get an hour paid lunch if we work 8+ hours, and I don’t work more than a 6-hr day, so I shouldn’t be getting an hour lunch…but I’m giving up my 30-min paid lunch in order to have a 60-min unpaid lunch, so they ought to go for it, I would think…we’ll see. The scheduler approved it for this coming Monday, but I think he’s going to talk it over with the boss because he didn’t say it was approved for the whole week as I had requested.

I’m finally playing The Sims again! My Sims blog is called My Sims Stories, and it’s just fun to keep a log of what’s happened. I started a new character using the romance aspiration to see if I could play it, but then I just used the InSIMinator cheats so I’m not sure it really counts. Oh look, this person instantly loves me! Now I can woo-hoo with them! Yeah, not very challenging.

I really want to travel this summer, it seems like everybody I know is traveling in some way or another. I want $1500 to burn on travel, I could have such a fabulous time with that, but I spent $5700 on hearing aids so that’s not very likely. I get to go to New Orleans in July anyway…I just have to be patient and wait for that to come around rather than lusting over trips for June or August. Anyway, I can’t afford to take so much time off, I need to work the whole summer!

The final word of wisdom I would like to impart right now is: Ben & Jerry’s Cheesecake Brownie ice cream is simply astonishingly wonderful. NOM NOM NOM.

I am stressed out right now because I have no money. I mailed $2600 worth of checks to my bank a couple of weeks ago, and they still haven’t shown up. They were mailed to an old address, but they still should have gotten there by now. There was a return address label on the envelope, so if they couldn’t be delivered they should have come back. They all had “For Deposit Only” on the back, along with my bank name and account number. I just don’t understand where they are. I’ve borrowed $2500 from A over the past couple of weeks because I have no money. I’ve overdrawn my account twice ($18 fee each time) which is something I’ve never done before. Maybe this school thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if I have no money. I’m trying not to touch my other account, because it’s for school tuition, but I owe A so much and it’s going to take a while to make it up. I worked last week, my office is closed next week, and I’m going to work the first week of January but then we are going to Los Angeles and then I go back to school. It’s just not enough. I could cry.

The calls kept coming in nonstop today so I am pretty much exhausted. I was chatting with another interpreter while we were both on break, and she agreed that we usually had less than 60 seconds between calls which is not enough! And of course at the end of the day I had technical difficulties - even the manager wasn’t sure what to do, but our center closes at 5:00 on Fridays so we ended up just transferring the call into oblivion and not knowing if it got picked up. (Normally when we need to transfer to another interpreter, we connect with the receiving terp first and let them know what the call content is, but it was the “connect with the receiving terp” part that wasn’t working!)

I am so tired. VRS turns out to be a really intense job, and working 8 hours yesterday and 7 hours today has left me exhausted. A is suggesting I cut back on my hours, because she doesn’t want me to be overtired, but it feels like it would be weird to work less than 32-40 hours. Maybe I will cut back a little bit while I get used to it, I don’t know. I just feel like I have been exhausted forever, I feel like I’ve been neglecting stuff, I feel like everything is a mess and I’m too tired to deal with it! It doesn’t help that I am dealing with really bad hives…5mg of prednisone per day is keeping life bearable but it’s still not any fun. Plus the prednisone is making me so hungry…I feel like I might as well pause my NutriSystem because otherwise I’m just wasting the food if I don’t stick to the diet. I haven’t broken down and gobbled food yet, but I am hungry all the time.

In other news, my PS2 is broken. It is officially dead. It was giving me problems loading The Urbz a while back, and now that I’ve been playing Guitar Hero 2 it’s been acting up again. I finally looked up the repair people and contact them through their chat service, where the guy honestly admitted that it would be better to just get another for $90 at GameStop. That was nice of him, considering he could have just said “sure, send it in” and taken my $60. But it still leaves me without a working Playstation, and I am only partway through GH2 on medium! I placed an ad on Craigslist in case anybody is in love with their Wii, Xbox, or PS3 and doesn’t want their working PS2 anymore, but I am not optimistic in that department.

Today was my first full day working in the VRS center at Gallaudet. I did a reasonably okay job, except for goofing up the explanation of regional toll-free numbers and fumbling a request to transfer a call when it was extending past the time I was supposed to leave. Oh, and my first call was an answering machine message that I didn’t actually leave because I had plugged my headset into the wrong jack! I didn’t figure that out until the next call, which was connected to a live person who couldn’t hear me, heh.

I discovered that you can’t really do anything important while you’re waiting for a new call to arrive - every time I went to start an e-mail or something, I had to leave in the middle of it, and when the call ended I had completely forgotten where I was in the letter. So mostly I just kept my e-mail window open to keep an eye on things, and I surfed news websites when I wasn’t on a call, because those are easy to drop instantly and come back to.

To be honest, I struggled with a lot of calls, particularly those where the connection was slow or the lighting was poor. But I taught myself a mantra on my very first day of training, and my trainer said it was a good one: As long as the communication was successful, I did a good job. Sure, sometimes I could have interpreted better, sounded better, been faster, etc. But the important thing is that the deaf person and the hearing person conducted their business together successfully. At the end of the day, that’s what matters.

Whew! Thanks to Dan getting my debugging juices flowing, I got the design issues on my webpage resolved. I had a lot of time to do that today; Thursdays are normally my busiest day but half of my clients weren’t there! I am really looking forward to the switch to VRS though. I’ve notified my company, and the supervisor of the four deaf guys I work with (who forwarded it to her supervisors!), and the liaison between the agency I work at and the company I work for. This is really seeming like a positive change.