Don't let me drown

2005-04-15 - 2:22 p.m.

I just got back from my six-month evaluation with my boss. Yes, today is my five-month anniversary of working here. No, I didn't point this out--I just wanted to get it over. It was sort of lame to have to go in early for the evaluation (I'm not working today until 3:30), but the evaluation itself was pretty glowing. But hey, what's not to love, right? Heh heh, right. Guess what he said was the one area where he thought I could improve. Go ahead guess. You won't guess it in a million years. He said I could be more vocal. Wait, what, you guessed that?

Last night I stayed a few hours extra to train with one of the night pharmacists on the extra duties that the graveyard shift entails. I'm going to be working a week of graveyards two weeks from now. I'm oddly sort of looking forward to that week. I mean, it's definitely a change from my routine.

And the really cool part is that after I work that week, which is seven days in a row of ten-hour shifts, I will have a six-day weekend. Awesome! I'm thinking I have to go somewhere or do something cool during that time. I stayed up until way too late last night dreaming up things for me to do. Go back to Sac for a bit? Go visit Tigger in LA? Go visit Flik in New York? Go visit Azuma in Japan? Go to some other touristy spot like Hawaii again? The problem is, of course, that nobody else has these same six days off so it seems as though whatever I do, it will be by myself. Which isn't too cool. I mean, how fun is it to go sit on the beach of Maui by yourself? My other thought was to go on a backpacking adventure. But again, that's not really something I should do by myself. Plus it's still a little early in the season for backpacking. I don't know, we'll see what I come up with.

And I was also sort of thinking that if I always get lots of time off after working graveyard shifts, maybe I should actually volunteer to work them whenever the regular guys go on vacation. I guess I'll wait to see how it actually goes before I go and do something like that. Who knows, I could hate it. Or I could have so much trouble switching my sleep schedule back to normal that I won't be able to take advantage of the days off anyway.

I officially signed up to run in a half-marathon with Kitten in two months. I'm pretty excited about that. The furthest I've ever actually run is that 12k (7.5 miles) back in last September, so I wasn't sure I could actually finish a half-marathon (13.1 miles). But yesterday morning I got up and ran the inner loop around Green Lake three times. That comes out to be 8.4 miles. When I was done I was still feeling pretty good and I sort of figure at that point what's another 5 miles? I'm fairly confident now that I can finish a half-marathon (by "finish" I mean without doing any walking) so I'm thinking I should actually set a time goal for myself. My initial thought is to set my goal for two hours and ten minutes. That puts me at a little under a ten-minute mile pace. I really don't know if I could manage that...which makes it a good goal, right?

I recently downloaded Firefox to give it a try. Why didn't you guys tell me that my layout looks like crap in Firefox?? One of these days I'll get around to fixing it. Actually, Firefox has some features that I like, but for the most part I think I like IE better. One of the main advantages of Firefox, so I've been told, is that it's faster than IE. I haven't found that to be true at all. In fact, I think the opposite is true. Is it supposed to also have fewer security issues than IE?

So I've found myself in this weird situation with the singer recently. The situation is a balancing act, which I think I'm not handling very well. On my end of things I have to balance letting myself feel comfortable and happy with him with not letting myself get too attached. It's a weird sort of standoffish affection. And then towards him I have to tell him how much I want him in just the right balance to let him know I care about him without letting him think I want him too much and scaring him away. I feel like I'm sort of calculating to try to get him to want to spend as much time with me as possible because all I want is to be with him while I can. I'm not doing too good of a job of it, though. Or maybe I'm doing as good as is possible in the situation.