Picking My Brain

…will be much better than this one. Oh wait, that’s right! You have to have a first life to have a second one….and I definately don’t have a first right now.

After some mock reprimanding from Meagan (and an actual poke or two), I am finally getting around to updating my blog. I didn’t realize that it had been aover a month since I last posted, but apparently it has. i have been crazy-busy the past month, and my blog isn’t the only thing that has felt the pain of my absence.

I am officially THE worst daughter in the world. I called my mom the other Friday night to find out how to correctly have the throw personalized for Teal (my cousin who just got married). Nobody was home, so I left a message. My dad called me back Saturday night saying, “oh! you haven’t fallen off the face of the earth!!” I was confused and claimed to be uber-busy until he let me in on what he was talking about. My mom had surgery (true, it was more cosmedic than medical, but it still was medical) and I never called her to see how it went. In fact, I completely forgot about it all together. Also, Friday was their wedding anniversary. 27 years. And I didn’t even remember that. I just played it off at the time, but I feel so terrible. I’m sure that my excuse of working from 11pm to 9 or 9:30 am everyday and driving an hour to classes from 6-8 pm four days a week is going to be exactly that to her: an excuse. I barely have time or the energy to do anything else! in fact, I don’t have the time or energy to do anything else. Almost every single article of clothing I own is dirty. I’ve even starting dipping into Ben’s dresser for shirts. How pathetic is that?! Especially last week - in order to have the days off for Teal’s wedding, I had to work eight days in a row. I was so miserable and grumpy I coudln’t stand myself. Poor Ben, some days I don’t know how he does it. All I do is rant and rave and cry and sleep. He’s about ready to commit me, and I can’t say I blame him! he told me the other day that he just thinks I can’t deal with the stress. He’s right, I can’t figure out how to deal with stress that won’t go away and only keeps getting worse. Work, school, family…it just keeps piling up!

Things at work were good for a while. Our new manager Ruth came in and made some great changes. It was rough to get everyone on board and there was some growing pains, but things were starting to settle down. Now, there’s a bunch of interpersonal communitcation that is either not happening or going completely wrong, and this is affecting everyone’s work performance. So a lot of people are adopting an “if they can’t see it my way, they must not care about me, so I won’t care about them or my work ethic.” Newbies see this “I-don’t-give-a-crap” attitude and think it’s okay, so they adopt it too. AND NOBODY TELLS THEM OTHERWISE!! I try to lead by example, and I find it works. If I work hard and stay busy and care about what other people think about my work, I find that the people (or person, as the case usually is on 3rd shift) that I’m with will do the same. I don’t let them get away with standing around and doing nothing or texting on their cells. I have tasks that I ask them to do. And there’s a key: I ask. I don’t tell or order. I ask. They say yes, and I thank them before they even do the job. Then I thank them again when it’s done. I tell them I appreciate them. I try to make them feel like they’re helping me, and I couldn’t do it without them…because I couldn’t!I even thank them again at the end of the day for just being there. I feel that I get much better results that way and I create a happier work enviornment. I’m not a slave driver, but it is my job to make sure that they do their jobs.

So Teal is married. Much congrats and happiness to her and Derek. The ceremony was beautiful and the reception a blast. Visit my MySpace page to see some pictures.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Teal and Derek and their family, and especially the family of Gina Griffin. I am leaving out details out of respect for those involved.

So I seem to be making it through classes. But we’ll see because I just double checked on all of my records. It looks like I may have gotten finanical aid for the year (that means next semester too, whoo-hoo!!). I just tried to register for my (hopefully) last two classes, but there’s still a hold on my account for some reason from the financial office, so I’m going down there today to figure it out. My problem now seems to be my schedules. The one class I need is from 6-10 p.m. on Thursdays. I can just change my days off to accomodate that. However, all of the other classes that I have to choose from are either in the morning or early afternoon. That makes it really hard to work out with my work schedule. There’s a possibility if I take one of the classes that I can make it work, but I’d have to switch to second shift. There’s two classes available that I would really like to take one of, but they are both Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes. I wonder if I could talk him into letting me do one of them as an independent study. I would do all of the work that the class is doing, just on my own and we could set up a seperate meeting time. I wil have to ask him, that would really work.