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May 02, 2005

BackBlogging - Incident Two

Daily-Journal-Type Post

Monday, April 18th. Sat around at work and did absolutely nothing. First day of Crazy Schedule : 8:30 - 5:30 work and 7:00 - 9:00 class

Tuesday, April 19th. More sitting around. Day Two of Crazy Schedule: 7:20 - 4:20 work and 5:30 - 10:30 class.

Wednesday, April 20th. Hmm.. What can I do today? I know, lets sit there and do nothing. Day Three: 7:20 - 4:20 work and 5:30 - 10:30 class.

Thursday, April 21st. Still doing a lot of sitting around at work. I finished the projects I had been given and had to wait until the lady (from here on out known as "TheExcelLady") who has been doing my job plus her's since January. She has a habit of giving me the excuse that she has to finish what she is doing before she can come to my desk to show me what to do. Apparently she doesn't seem to quite comprehend the concept of "degree in computers" or "Microsoft certified." When she finally came over to my desk to show me what I needed to do different to the next project... What was it that she had to show me? How to delete a row in Excel. Oh Please! Thursday night class was class as usual and those pictures have been posted for a while now. Day Four: 7:20 - 4:20 work and 5:30 - 10:30 class.

Friday, April 22nd. Today I went and ate lunch with a lady from work. It was good to get out of there for an hour. That was an hour that I wasn't staring at the computer screen. I left work at 5:30 and sat in traffic forever. I got home about 6:15 and after seeing a slight taste of what I75N looked like I decided to go home for a few minutes to wait out some of the traffic before heading to Tannah's to start working on her home office. Afterwards, I ate dinner at TwoRows, where I had an UglyMug Root Beer and a chicken sandwich with some damn good HoneyPepper Bacon on it. Day Five: 8:30 - 5:30 work and 7:00 - 9:30 Tannah's Office.

Saturday, April 23rd. Today I went to Panera Bread and worked from a little before 11am until nearly 5:30. By the time my relief showed up at 5:00 I was just falling asleep on my feet. I went home and slept most of the night. The rest of the evening was spent cleaning up my apartment and doing laundry.. packing up my chef's uniforms for the upcoming week (since I go straight from work to class).

Sunday, April 24th. Panera Bread again... Arrived bright and early .. before the sun even woke up. I worked from about 6:45 am until they sent me home early at 1:20 because we were slow.

Monday, April 25th. This was the beginning of my 2nd week at work. The guy who hired me was on vacation and I was left to fend for myself in pulling work out of "TheExcelLady". Sometimes I was more successful than others. I just learned to start working on homework in my down times.

I left work on my own to attempt to find some posterboard on my lunch hour and I stayed at work long after I clocked out finishing a project that was due that evening. We got to class and the instructor didn't show up. One of the chef's filled in for her and covered one chapter and took up our homework and then let us go home an hour early! I was bored, and although I was thoroughly exhausted, I didn't feel like being at home. I headed out to the closest thing to a chef's utopia that is still open at 9pm... Central Market. I spent way too much money but I had a whole lot of fun pushing my cart up and down every single aisle.

Tuesday, April 26th. Well, I was supposed to have been at work at 7:30. I was already running a few minutes late, compared to last week when I got there at 7:20 every morning, I walked out side and pressed the button on my car remote... nada. Pressed it again ... nada. After slapping it and shaking it and darn near jumping on it, I decided to open my car up with the key.

What did I hear? "eee! eeh! eeh! eeh! reeeoooonn! reeeoooon! woooOOOp! wooooOOOp! wOO! woo! OO! woo! eeeaaaww! eeeaaaww! AAAAeeeeeAAAAeeeeAAAeeee"

Thank you to Officer B for that glorious car alarm interpretation.

It wont turn off, and my engine wont turn on. I also realize that in all the commotion that my cell phone decided to take a mechanical siesta and wouldn't connect any call I dialed. So I went back inside my apartment, got to listen to my upstairs neighbors complain about the car alarm going off at 6:50am and sat there for 10 minutes waiting for Saturn to open. When I finally got in touch with someone at the dealership, they basically informed me that I had to crawl under my hood to find the fuse box to unplug my alarm system so I could get to work.

Now, I neglected to mention that the reason I was running late this morning was because I had changed clothes 4 times. I didn't like the way the first outfit fit on my fat butt, the second outfit.. the shoes were too uncomfortable, the third outfit, the outside part of the twin set kept clinging to the insider part and finally I put on something I decided I could survive in until 5:30pm. Then.. I got dirty climbing around under the hood of my car and ended up putting on the 2nd outfit with the uncomfortable shoes before I could go to work. Needless to say, I was 30 minutes late to work.

Tuesday night class was class as usual. It was chicken night, chicken soup, chicken pot pie... chicken chicken chicken. The pot pie was a lot better than I thought it was going to be from reading the recipe and I ate it for dinner that night before coming home.

Wednesday, April 27th. This morning I went into the bathroom and reached for a towel on the bottom of the linen closet. They had been sitting down there since I moved in, as the towels I used were just put back on top of the pile. I have also slowly been throwing away the towels that were falling apart. The first towel I picked up was soaking wet, as were the half a dozen towels under it. Complete with a good case of mold and mildew. Apparently there was a leak somewhere. I quickly threw all the towels in the washing machine and then grabbed another towel from under the sink and proceeded to get ready. When I got to work I called the apartment complex and left them a message that they needed to come fix whatever leak was causing all the mold, and I didn't think much more of it. I went to class and then came home, posted pictures on the blog, and went to bed as I was exhausted.

Thursday, April 28th. About 4 am I woke up with a throbbing migraine, complete with the floating black dots in front of my left eye blocking most of my vision. You would think after spending 21 years in Houston that I would be used to mold and mildew (anything that sits still for more than 15 minutes in Houston will have something black or green growing on it.) I got up and took some medicine and went back to bed. At 7:15 I called in sick to work, as I still couldn't see out of my left eye and it would have been extremely dangerous to drive to work in that condition. I went back to bed and slept until nearly noon. Then I got up and moved to the couch, where I turned on a movie and proceeded to go back to sleep. I played poppit on the internet for a few hours and then went back to sleep, slept right thru class. About 8pm I finally got up enough energy to take a bubble bath and get ready to go back to work the next day. I also called in sick to Panera Bread, where I was supposed to work tomorrow night from 6 - 10.

Friday, April 29th. Back at work at 8:30. 1-1/2 hour lunch at 11:20. Two of the managers in my department took "TheExcelLady" and I out to lunch at SaltGrass for Professional Lackey week. It was good but when we got back I could have easily curled up in my cubicle in the back corner of the office and gone to sleep. After work I came home and curled up on the couch and slept until nearly 11pm. I woke up and played lottso on the net with some pogo-buddies until about 2am.

Saturday, April 30th. Today I was a complete and total bum. I did nothing constructive, a little bit of destructive (finished off an entire roll of slice & bake cookies) and miserably enjoyed every minute of it. I knew I had a lot of stuff I needed to get done, but I convinced myself that it would all be ok and that I needed this day to do nothing, and staying awake while doing it.

Sunday, May 1st. Sunday morning I woke up, did the unimaginable (cooked scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast) and then started in on my pile of homework. I finally set up my binders and dividers for each class, did my homework for menu management and finished typing out my recipes for weeks 3 - 5 for both Southwestern & American Regional... *note, tomorrow starts week 5 so I had been a little behind on this chore. I got cleaned up and went to work at Panera Bread about 5pm and got home about 9:30. I cleaned my apartment the rest of the evening and went to bed about 1 am.

Monday, May 2nd. I woke up this morning in a pretty good mood and felt better than I had in a week or so. This lasted for a few hours until I had to make some phone calls to deal with the absolute Nimbusols that claimed that they hadn't gotten the renewal form from my insurance company since January 29th and that they were just now sending me a letter the last week of April. They said I needed to call my insurance company and get them to forward them the verification letter proving that I had renewed my policy in January. I'm sitting here thinking (outloud) since when is it the customer's responsibility to make phone calls between two companies who are supposed to have a working relationship?

Of course, GMAC claimed they called and that my insurance agency refused to send it to them. This I knew immediately was the biggest bunch of mularky I had ever heard since the people at our Allstate place are the sweetest people in the world. I called my agent and she of course, confirmed my suspicion that they hadn't bothered calling and that she would send them a copy of the letter, although they had already sent one out in January. I wish someone would just dream up a way to snap their fingers and collectively slap the idiots who work for these huge conglomerates who have employees who work on the right hand have no clue what those on the left hand are doing and NONE of them could tell the difference between a elephant and a big money-sucking sink hole. (oops, wait a minute, is there a difference?)

I ending up working thru lunch today, sat in on a meeting with a programmer and two sales people setting up a more automated system for creating our pricing contracts. It was pretty fun to finally get to do something, AND they bought our lunch and had Jason's Deli delivered. I left about 5:15 and drove home, dropped off some dry cleaning, and went to class. The entire time I was wondering what our midterm was going to be like since the instructor wasn't in class last week.

I arrived at class and she quickly informed us that she was postponing the extra credit project that was supposed to be due today (because she wasn't there to assign it) until next week, then she postponed the big Menu Project that is based off the extra credit project until the week after that. Then she asked what sort of exam review we were given the week before, and after all of us agreed that the sub didn't even mention the midterm ... she decided that she wasn't confortable with the way she felt over giving us a midterm exam without a review... so she let us use our textbook and notes. We were also told that we could leave as soon as we were done with the exam.

That test was easy.. especially with the book there to look up all the answers. After class I stopped by a small little hole in the wall seafood place on Forest Lane that I have been passing practically every day since January. I got catfish and shrimp and it was very good. I am going to have to go back and try the rest of the stuff on the menu. Fried catfish is not my favorite seafood dish.. but they have grilled catfish and I'm really looking forward to going to try that.

I came home and started watching tv and I started updating this blog at 9:26 pm. It is now 12:24 am and I am finally done. No wonder I haven't done this in over a week. I am all packed and ready for class tomorrow night and my camera is already packed in my purse ready to take pictures of whatever we cook as a group for our midterm.

Whew... My fingers are dead now. Night!

Posted by FutureFoodTVStar at May 2, 2005 09:26 PM

Comments

Posted by: Jeff Vachon at May 3, 2005 08:46 AM

Posted by: Karagape at May 3, 2005 09:39 AM

Posted by: whatupthen at May 4, 2005 03:00 AM

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