May Contain Nuts

Well, quite a lot has happened since my last update… Let’s go through it, shall we?

Ash got in on the first, and all was rejoicing and happiness, whee! Mom and I went to pick her up at the airport and we brought her home to a fine home-cooked meal of Gold Star Chili (it’s a Cincinnati thing, nevermind), after which we talked in the living room for a while before going to bed.

Wednesday we started day-tripping to the sights and sites around town. We went to the Cathedral in Covington (links will be added later… maybe…), then to Eden Park, Krohn Conservatory, and finally Union Terminal, one of the damn coolest pieces of art deco architecture ever built. Ever. Thing’s freaking enormous too.

Thursday we had brunch with my grandma, then we went home and I finished up my final project and we headed off to school to demonstrate it. Hutchins (my teacher) was speechless. He gets really annoyed when I do this kind of crap, and he made that rather well known. Not to say he was mad or disappointed… more like he just couldn’t find anything to critique me on besides a strange floating pink box that ended up in the renders of the observation deck (I think Marcel accidentally unhid it when he was helping me with the final images and animations… for which I am very very grateful… Marcel is awesome, I must send him thank-you somethings). So that was a huge success… thank god. Bloody thing nearly drive me insane, especially the hotspot programming bit. Oy.

Anyway, Friday was a rather short day because it was graduation, so we didn’t really get much else done. Graduation was at 7, and I was rather confused and worried when I flipped through the graduation program and couldn’t find my name… Hutchins came over and teased me about it (bad idea teasing someone who just spent the last three weeks panicing over a project by coming up and telling him the floating pink box failed him…). What actually happened was that for some reason they forgot to list me under the Multimedia department, though I was, in fact, listed under the Highest Honors graduates (kept my 4.0 all the way to the end, woo-hoo!). There was a small seet inserted into the back of the program with a “corrected list” of Multimedia graduates… all three of us. Anyway, got through the ceremony with diploma (will scan it later) and highest honors trophy in-hand (had to give back my honors cords and National Technical Honors Society stole because ITT is cheap :P) and Ash, mom, dad, Tim, and I went down to the riverfront (a 3 minute walk, tops) to have dinner at TGI Fridays. After that we went to Blockbuster to rent some movies. Unfortunately, Blockbuster is no longer a movies-only kind of store, which has destroyed their selection, much to my annoyance. However, we did find two things to rent, so we came home and watched one (Kaena: The Prophecy… an older but very well-done CG film, which to my fascination had one of the Revelation team members in its character animation department: Pascal Blanche [I'm too tired to do accenting on the E, but it's there]) before trekking up to bed.

Saturday was the family graduation party, so again, not much tripping was done. Got a fair amount of moolah, and afterwards we went to Best Buy to get a copy of L.A. Story (which for some reason we never bought despite mom’s adoration of the movie). We were going to rent it, but as I mentioned above, Blockbuster’s selection sucks now, so it’s now a permanent spot in my movie library. We also bought some printer ink for my Epson because I’m totally out of everything, but I still need to get 2 more cartridges. Been buying them in stages to spread out the cost… ink is NOT cheap, and it’s even less so when you own a 6-cartridge photo printer :P.

Aaaanyhoo, the rest of Saturday was spent working on a project which I am now contracted to do for an exhorbitant amount of money, much to my delight, amazement, and relative terror. Can’t post anything more about it, but it’ll be keeping me busy for the next couple of months.

Sunday mom took Ash and me out and about downtown Cincinnati to see more sights. We got to go to the top of Carrew Tower (tallest building in Cincy) and look around on the observation deck. After that we roamed the streets and ended up at Sawyer Point Park, then we roamed some more and ended up back at the car with a significant number of photographs. Since it was after 5 we figured (correctly) that the Art Museum (which we’d tried to get to Wednesday but ended up at Union Terminal instead) was closed, so we went home, had dinner, hung out around the house, watched Last Samurai, and went to sleep.

Monday we tried going to the art museum again, only to discover to our dismay that the art museum is closed on Mondays. Apparently such information was news to everyone in the family. So, with that plan again foiled, we decided to literally walk around the art museum, then took off to see the University of Cincinnati, which has, much to my surprise and amazement, made huge progress since I was last there. They might actually finish their MainStreet Construction project on-time (maybe not on-budget, but possibly on-time… a real rarity in this city). It started raining while we were there, and the ride back home was rather unceremoniously interrupted by me spilling my bottle of coke all over the truck because my hands and the bottle were both slick from the rain. I never claimed to be coordinated. The rest of Monday and all day today were spent in a fairly mopey sort of way, wishing Ash didn’t have to go back to Portland without me, which really only got worse after I dropped her off at the airport. And to top the day off, I had to close booth.

Which brings me to my penultimate paragraph… Apparently while I was gone, the “MP3 players keep Booth employees from going psycho and killing people” policy was over-ruled by the “floor people don’t think it’s fair that Booth employees get to wear mp3 players while they’re working” policy, which means no more Benton at work on Thursdays to keep me from being in a really pissed off mood. This only served to piss me off, and then I didn’t have my music to calm me down again (and I was already in a crummy mood before I got to work), so it took Pat getting out a hack saw, a dremel, and a steel rod to cheer me up again (we were working on one of Pat’s super-insanity projects which involves steel rods, film rollers, and new film syncing paths). Tiffany going and getting me snackies certainly helped too. Generally speaking, though, it was a quiet night, which is good, because I don’t think I would have been able to handle Ash leaving, losing my MP3 player because the floor is full of whiney bastards, AND having to do an NCN changeout plus 3 weekly cleanings all in one night. As it stands I only had to do 1 weekly projector cleaning and there was no NCN changeout. My sole comfort in knwoing that I still have to work at AMC until I get a permanent full-time job is that this contract job will bring in almost as much in 3 months as I make in a year at AMC< so I'll be in the money for a while... can finally get to fund some professional purchases, like a Photoshop upgrade, a Power Mac, a 23" cinema display... the works. w00. And what doesn't go into professional stuff will go towards the truck and my student loans.

Last paragraph, and then I’ll shut up. I may also be getting a third job working with my former classmates and hutchins to do some math tutorials for ITT to help decrease their apparently massive failure rate since the math classes went online-only. So hopefully that’ll pan out as well.

Pahket update: render times may bring me down to the last minute on this one if the computer at school doesn’t render much faster than my desktop here, which literally chokes on the exterior mesh now because of the high polycount. Efforts to create an update image for your viewing pleasure have met with stout resistance from the computer, demanding 4 hours to finish just over a half of a single, final, full-sized image.

Took another trip to the Apple store today and got to play with a Mac mini… those things’re cool. And with as small and light as they are, I’ve no doubt someone will eventually make good on their eternal promise to throw their computer out the window the next time it does . It’d be a lot easier than tossing a tower (you’re liable to pull your back out doing that), and a LOT less expensive than chucking a G5 iMac or a PowerBook (or any other laptop computer for that matter) ;). I had to force myself to leave before I did something I knew I’d regret, like trying to buy a computer with no money… I had to warn the store employees not to sell me anything.

I can honestly say that tonight was a night at work where absolutely NOTHING happened. I got to monitor a trainee for almost 5 hours to make sure he didn’t botch anything up, and then I turned everything off and went home over the following 3 hours. Thrilling, I tell ya. On the bright side, though, I did get to see the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trailer. That movie looks stellar, really. Can’t wait for May… but first, must get project done and graduate and get Ash out here in March… and find a job… then I’ll worry about May.

And now, it’s sleepy time, or nearly so. So I’ll bring this to a close without explaining what the title has to do with this entry whatsoever, bwahaha!

It’s like there’s some sort of grand cosmic Justice-ometer that’s fanally figured out I’m in need of some sweet lovin’… it’s a trickle, but it’s still enough to brighten my spirits a bit…

So I’ve all but officially put in my two weeks’ notice at work. Pat hasn’t been around to tell yet, but one of the other managers knows I’m leaving. I’m also expecting a call from the hospital HR regarding the file clerk job tomorrow… we’re getting really good at playing phone tag apparently :-P. On top of THAT, I’ve discovered that (unless Pat decides to change the schedule) I’m actually NOT working Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, so I’ll actually be lucid and blissful enough to enjoy the holiday with everyone for a change… this is probably the first real “family” holiday I’ll actually be able to spend with both sides of the family. The past couple of years I’ve worked at some point on both Christmas and Thanksgiving, or I’ve just been out of town entirely, so this will be nice.

Dad even dragged the tree down from the attic today (hooray for plastic trees that still manage to shed like real ones O.o), though it didn’t get set up. I half suspect mom left him a nasty note telling him to get the freaking tree out before Christmas, but I’m ignoring that possibility for now and just contemplating the concept that dad voluntarilly got out Christmas decorations ;). I still need to set my tree up… been so busy the past couple of days it just hasn’t gotten done yet. Will try again tomorrow.

And it’s supposed to snow this weekend. Yay snow!

Fox’s getting a crapload of extra pay now… spent 4 hours picking a print up off the floor last night, and I go back in 5 hours :P. Wish I could say it would count as OVERTIME, but seeing as how I don’t work 40 hours a week to begin with, that’s hardly the case here.

Honestly, any time you work beyond what you’re scheduled to work should be counted as overtime and be paid for accordingly (time and a half).

Well, this is fun.

I woke up at 6:30 this morning feeling utterly sick to my stomach. So much so that I was convinced I wasn’t going to make it to the bathroom before my dinner came back up. It never did, but man, that was not cool. Anyway, I went back to bed and woke up around 8:30 courtesy of my alarm going off because I had to be at work at 10. At that point, still feeling ill, I decided I was going to call off of work today, because I would likely be spending most of the time in the bathroom if I did go in (either that, or mopping up messes in the booth). So, I called the theatre at around 9:30 (since I knew nobody would be there before then), got no answer. Tried back a couple of times on both lines before falling asleep again in an attempt to stem off another wave of queasyness. When I woke back up it was 11:40, shift started almost 2 hours ago. I called the theatre, told Alex I had tried earlier and nobody had answered the phone, that I was sick, and that I wouldn’t be coming in. He said okay, that he’d take care of it, and hung up.

Now, here’s the kicker.

I got a call a little while ago from Aaron, my manager in booth, saying that I was on a week’s suspension for an unexcused absence (basically, since I didn’t call in before the start of my shift, I wasn’t excused from being there). Now, the trick to this is that nobody was going to be in the god-damned building until after my shift was supposed to start ANYWAY, so I really had no way to call off before my shift in the first place. There’s also, apparently, some sort of issue with me being late all the time, which is odd, because I’ve been in the building on-time for the past couple of months. If they’re referring to the fact that I seem to be clocking in late for my day shifts, well, that’s partly because getting into the building before we open is damn near IMPOSSIBLE because the managers are all hiding in their little back office and nobody will come out to open the damn DOOR, so I end up getting into the building late no matter when I actually get there (especially for maintenance shifts, when I’m there at the same time as the opening manager, and if they’re late, I’m fucking screwed.

So, I’m off of work until Friday next, and I have to go talk to Aaron on Tuesday about scheduling. What I’d *really* like to do is go into the meeting on Tuesday and tell Aaron I’m quitting because of the sheer stupidity of the management and call-off policy, not to mention the fact that Aaron is a lazy bastard who comes in and leaves whenever the hell he feels like it, leaving the rest of us to do the extra work, and the fact that I was personally insulted by basically being told I didn’t do my job when Aaron wasn’t around. I’ve had it with dealing with other people’s fuck-ups, other people’s attitudes, and the constant, unending level of stress and paranoia that I have to deal with whenever I walk in the damn door. I don’t get paid nearly enough for this shit.

So tomorrow, I plan on going around town looking for a new job. AMC can kiss my ass. I don’t care if this does cripple the booth staff… they have plenty of other people they can train in maintenance, and there’s tons of floor employees who would love to go work in booth. Those poor, stupid bastards…

Procrastination is gonna kill me one of these days… or get me killed. That, and WAY over-sleeping…

In other news, HBI is back. Considering that all of the various ranting and rambling things I had on the old Realm can be basically consolidated into this blog, I’ll officially declare the site as complete and move on to updating it whenever the hell I have a free moment or something to rave about. Might be able to convince a few friends to join me too… we’ll see.

Anyways… again, everybody should go see Brother Bear. Now. I don’t care if the theatre’s closed, go camp out in front of the box office. Really, get your screen time in while the movie has the slight chance of playing in a BIG house (house being a term for a single screen within a multi-screen complex, like “house 10″) at your local megaplex… once Matrix comes out (in TWO DAYS), the only place you’ll find Brother Bear is stuffed into the little 90-seat house. Damn hype. I’ll probably be pre-screening Matrix Tuesday night since we’re getting four, possibly FIVE prints of it, and they all have to be previewed to make sure they’re visually and aurally perfect. This speaks nothing of the film’s actual quality, though, and I’ll be sure to let the three people who know this site exists know whether the movie’s worth seeing or not (my initial guess is not, but I could be pleasantly surprised…).