\o/ \o/ \o/

I am done with university for the year, people. It is possible I have failed both papers and will need to decide whether to retake them or give up on the degree, but. I am DONE. DONE, I say.

And in honour of the first weekend since freakin' February that I have been able to do all the things that I usually do on weekends but without feeling guilty about it all over the place and whining to my flatmates and the internet about how difficult my life is, I have... done the things that I usually do on weekends, but without feeling guilty about it all over the place.

To wit, I:

• tidied my room yesterday, including semi-shelving the books I bought at Bookfair back in early September (they're not on the floor anymore! Yay!)
  
• had callie and factioncat around for lots and lots of drinking and conversations about, alternately, wenching and politics. It's the piratical way!
  
• suffered through a vodka- and bottled margharita-induced hangover this morning. Never again with the Jose Cuevero bottled lemon shit, callie! Never again, I say. From now we are sticking to the class that is Apple Sourz and Vodka Cruisers.
  
• ate packet pasta stuff for lunch! Chicken curry-flavoured pasta for the motherfucking win!
  
• listened to a LOT of Beyonce. What?
  
• started cracking with a playlist for jessikast, who wants to run places
  
• vacuumed the entire house
  
• talked tamarillow into watching vids with me and nishatalitha into barbequing shrimps for dinner (neither of these things took much persuasion, it must be said)
  
• read porn. For the fucking-your-mother win! :D Actually, I lie, there was no incest or talk of incest, I don't read that anymore.
  
• contemplated making fudge, which I might do once we haul the barbeque up from the garage
  
• took a bunch of pictures of the house and garden, coz it's a very sunny day here in Wellington and I'm feeling all happy or whatever-the-fuck.
  
• snagged episode 3 of White Collar, which I am enjoying immensely!

And, for serious, now it's time to go DO THINGS again. I'm wearing jandals! Uh, doing things and jandals aren't connected, but I'm okay with that!

Ahaha NO MORE EXAMS UNTIL NEXT YEAR! WHEE! \o/

So like. Last night I randomly fell over when walking across my entirely flat and clear bedroom floor (well, the clear part of it) and rolled my right ankle and twisted (I think) my left, and while my left ankle is today only slightly sore, the right is still totally all puffy and shit.

So like. nishatalitha is kind of accident prone.

I thought, for one glorious day, that I was the reigning flat clumsy person, but then she went up the hill with tamarillow to watch the fireworks while I stayed at home and ostensibly studied (for "study" read "read a lot of porn").

And while she was there, she fell off a small ledge hidden in the grass in the dark and really badly rolled her left ankle and fucked up that knee as well. Her other knee and ankle are fucked from, like, tripping on the sidewalk in heels on Sunday night (as well as that thing where she was playing frisbee and then thought she'd broken her ankle a couple of years ago).

So now she's lying on my bed clearly in pain, with her left knee iced and up on pillows, while tamarillow and I debate just not letting her out of the house anymore, jesus fuck. Who's with us?

I have my Torts exam tomorrow morning. AHAHA. Total amount of study: circa 15 hours, I think. Total amount of study done today, on a day which I took off work so I could study? Three minutes.

I own this black top with beige polka dots, right, and I'd completely forgotten that I owned it until I randomly found it folded under my bed two weekends ago. So then I washed it again (who knows what else lives under my bed? I sure as shit don't) and wore it to work today with a black cardigan and black pants and my formerly-pink-now-beige docs. It was fairly rocking.

Anyway, the purpose of that story is to give this story, which is that I was randomly talking to one of my drafters, and she said: "hey, I really like that top of yours!"

To which I replied, "Thanks!" and then "Yeah, so I'd completely forgotten that I owned it until I randomly found it folded under my bed two weekends ago."

And she said, "So, basically it was like Christmas, then?" And she laughed, and I laughed, and then I did the sudoku.

The point of this story is not that I get along with my drafters, but that I have no brain-to-mouth filter and it is a constant struggle for me in conversation (with people I know fairly well) to not, like, randomly start telling them every little thought that pops into my head about how my life is a pit of misery right now (not really) and just what I think of the tort of negligence (bollocks, piss, shit, ass, inconsistent vocabulary usage combined with a lack of imagination on the part of both counsel and judges so that we have a system where we think that the words we use—proximity, reasonable forseeability—somehow make sense even though the sense in which they're meant is so stretched from the original meaning as to be entirely insane and ILLOGICAL, KIRK).

Yeah.

This is the most ridiculous bullshit course outline I have ever seen in my entire life: Marketing 304.

For those who cannot be bothered clicking the link (I've mainly just put it there so you know I'm not making this shit up), the summary is:

"Development of thinking skills in the work areas of creativity, problem solving, and interpersonal relations; in the psychological areas of self-confidence, emotional intelligence and attitude control; and in the arts of understanding customers and learning from experience."

It costs $918.

YES.

For $918, you can learn the art of learning from experience. You can develop your THINKING SKILLS (which, thinking was a compulsory subject in third form when I was in high school. Kids these days, wot). But only in the listed "work areas". Other areas of your life which may require thinking skills shall remain undeveloped.

Marketing may well be a much more academic, analytical subject than I am given to understand. Nevertheless: AHAHAHAHA.

Just for jessikast:

====> is the new <3

When I woke up this morning for the first time, all I could think was that my head felt like a bowl full of jelly. And I thought about that for a while, and found myself thinking that I am really strange, because the normal analogy is "stuffed full of cotton wool". But that wasn't right.

So I called in sick to work and spent 6 hours sleeping.

My head does feel like it's stuffed full of cotton wool now.

Um. So I'm feeling kind of conflicted. In my head (and hopefully on digital paper) I'm reasonably able to communicate my thoughts, but when I try to talk to people it comes out in grunts and stutters and short phrases all muddled together (I get like this when I'm sick and when I'm tired and when I'm drunk, and I'm sick and tired at the moment), and I don't think it very likely I'll be much better tomorrow. But! I've got work; I've got class; New Girl starts tomorrow; and I'm meant to be doing stuff for mooting. But!

I think I might take to my bed with a Terry Pratchett novel and see how I feel in the morning.

Things that have happened:

• I had a mince and cheese pie for breakfast
  
• I got photoshop installed on my computer at work (I do not in fact know how to use photoshop. It shall be a learning experience) for legitimate work purposes
  
• I did quite a bit of work for the drafter (not one of my usual ones) who writes everything in red ink and gives really detailed instructions. I know his regular secretary doesn't mind this, but omg it would piss me off if I had to deal with that regularly. It makes me feel like I'm being judged, even though each round of changes has nothing to do with me making mistakes.
  
• I had lunch with callie and we bitched about our mothers
  
• I spent ages trying to find things on the website, and bitching about how I can't easily find things on the website. This is because the website sucks, not because I do.
  
• I got really nice feedback from the head of IS
  
• I had a conversation with one of my drafters that went like this:
  • Him: do you normally do the Sudoku?
    
  • Me: Yes. I think it's good for me to spend 20 minutes a day thinking.
    
  • Him: ...
    
  • Him: O.o
    
  • Him: AHAHAHA
    
  • Him: that's pretty damning
    
  • Me: *innocent* What?
• This is the drafter whom I spend so much time talking to about shit that it's getting hard for me to maintain the correct level of lawyer/secretary distance
  
• Also, I'm really mean to him
  
• Actually, I think one of the drafters on level 12 is scared of me coz I sort of told him off—very gently! I smiled the whole time and told him his mistake wasn't irrevocable, just a pain to fix!—last week
  
• I typed up the journal jessikast and I wrote last summer during our road trip. Once she's written her bit and uploaded some of the million billion photographs to flickr or somewhere we can post this great literary work to the interwebs
  
• In retrospect, we spent a lot of that week drinking
  
• bullet points are awesome

hi internets!

i'm kind of drunk and sloppy right now. like, after dinner - which was lasagne! which tamarillow made! - i didn't feel like returning to the interweb, so me and nishatalitha broke out the apple sourz and then the tequila. i had 2 more shots of tequila than nishatalitha, but we drank pretty quickly - i think dinner was at 8 or so and we had ~a lot of apple sourz and ~a lot of tequila, so. it hasn't hit yet? idk.

but point is.

i don't think i have a point.

anyways.

i'm kind of drunk! it's really fun! i've been stressing out lately with work and uni, and like- like if i hadn't been doing uat testing at work i would totally have taken a week off since it's uni holidays and MAAAAAAAAN i could do with a break but like. i have to do testing? so i can't. and the end of testing coincides with one of the 2 other CAs on my floor going on holiday for a month coz she's moving house, so i can't go on holiday then. and then i'm back at uni. for six weeks. i think i can take some time off in september, maybe? idk.

the shift key is for losers. that is all.

uh. some people might point out that i have demonstrated use of the shift key in the course of this post, to which i would just like to say: maaaaan, I KNOOOOOOOW. exclamation point.

Language is a funny thing. There are two of us at work with my first name (which is a fairly uncommon one) and so we've begun calling each other "Miss —" or, rather, other people have started calling each of us that, which feels something like a throwback to the fifties and also something like convenient. Uh. Also, I've begun saying "jolly good" and calling things "gumph"—the latter because of one of my lawyers, who is very british and also very proper, in that slightly eccentric madcap English way, says it a lot. I don't know where the "jolly good" comes from though. It's about as useful as awesomesocks, in my opinion, which is to say very.

Uhhhhh. Work continues apace; we're halfway through UAT and I'm doing mostly cleanup of documents plus a lot of other vaguely productive things. I had my performance appraisal yesterday, which consisted of Boss saying she had no problems and me saying I didn't either, followed by a discussion which ranged from Addled through my university studies and how that impacts on my ability/willingness to do a short professional course on Word (it's technically in my performance plan for this year. I don't have time to do it, though) through office politics and the testing process and finally ending up in how I don't really want a man in my life because I like my independance. Yeah. My boss is totally understanding of this life plan.

University: torts test next saturday, completely unprepared. Passed the contracts test solidly, if unexceptionally; I'm sitting right at the bottom of the top third of the class. My LRW opinions do bring that up, though. I'm greatly enjoying my hour-long lunchbreaks.

... so, I am Hazel at Dreamwidth.

Have spent about an hour and a half playing around with CSS for the first time in my entire life ever, and have managed to (a) change the colours in this style, and (b) get rid of some of the borders I did not want.

However! I managed to work out, through dint of applying basic logic and my hazy knowledge of html and xml to, uh, whatever I'm working with, to even up how the comment line sits within the comment line border. And I have centered the "Recent Entries [...]" navigation bar (ideally I'd like it to align with the edge of the dark border round the entries, but I think that's a variable width so I don't know if that's possible).

More to play with; I'm not sure if I like the colour scheme that much—but the important thing is that I now know what each of the variables (at least for the colours) does.

Achievement!

Things I still have to sort out:

• why there is a "previous 20" about 4/5 down the first screen's worth—and why it has a white bullet point when nothing else does
  
• uhhhh. Do I even like orange that much?

tamarillow: I can't believe... and I've read fanfic in which they're turkeys
me: I know. I know.
tamarillow: You know the one I'm talking about, don't you?
me: ... yeah.
tamarillow: SGA, of course, not this fandom.
me: ... yeah.

Our lives? Tragic. Both collectively AND individually.

So the "I have an assignment due in less than 24 hours and have only written less than a quarter of it oh god why have I sunk to these depths of academic failure oh well it's only 800 words and worth 5% stupid law school terms at least I have coke and the support of my flatmates to guide me ahahaha oh" thing has begun.

At least I have coke and the support of my flatmates to guide me. Ahahahah.

I have always had trouble socializing my Sims (ahahahaah) but in this round of me playing it (I've figured out how to make custom content work properly! The game is so much prettier!) I've realised that my Sims can, like, socialize by CHATTING ON THEIR COMPUTERS. WITHOUT LEAVING THEIR HOUSES. WHOO.

I'm keeping myself awake at night - not on purpose, I swear! - designing Sim houses in my head. It's all about the architecture, baby.

DANCING WITH THE STARS FINAL.

OMG. ( CUT FOR SPOILERS, EVEN THOUGH I DON'T KNOW IF YOU CAN EVEN WATCH IT ANYWHERE IF YOU'RE NOT WATCHING IT ON TV, BUT MAYBE YOU LIKE VIDEOED IT OR SOMETHING )

A semi-funny work story! That I can talk about outside of work, and which does not require intimate knowledge of where I work (which I can't talk about)!

So. Documents go through several stages of proofreading before they are published. This particular document goes through several stages of proofreading. Amendments are made, and those amendments are checked (by the author, and by the proofreaders).

The document is published.

First thing Monday morning the author comes to me and says, "So, the proofreaders missed something. An External Organisation pointed it out to me." And lo and behold, in the last line on a page, just so it stands out, are the words "public consumption". Only, missing the "l".

Ooops. And hee.

Saturday: work all day. Got very irritated with S. at one point because she pulled her usual thing of making [inaccurate] assumptions about my motives, opinions, and worldview and snapped at me not to question her without bothering to ask me what I was actually going to question her about. Later, I pointed out to her the error of her sales sheet ways and she (gasp) apologised. Am still bitter.

nishatalitha invited me to the movies, but there was nothing both of us wanted to see, so we ended up going to Kelburn and renting A Cinderella Story, which wasn't as bad as either of us expected. Then I read an Amanda Quick novel and knitted. Went to bed too late.

Sunday: work all day. Got very irritated with various customers, including but not limited to the one who implied (not-very-subtly) that I was fat: [talking about buying country/western costumes with his wife] "I don't have the right kind of figure for the kind of things costumers make. Neither do you, snort. My wife is alright, though." Yeah, shut the fuck up, fat man. At least I have breasts.

Got invited to dinner at Carmel's - bean casserole. And it turned out that she'd seen Cotillion (by Georgette Heyer) at Arty Bee's and bought it for me! So that was all fantastic and lovely, since it was the one of her novels that I didn't have and most wanted. Chatted with her and nishatalitha for a while, walked home carrying a whole bag of books, and stayed up far too late reading Cotillion.

Today: was still dark when I pulled my ass out of bed at seven in the morning. Well, mostly dark. Swore at shoes on floor (tripped), door, kitchen floor (too cold), lack of towel already on towel rail in bathroom (am lazy), temperature of shower (dumb fucking thermostat). Blearily read part of Julia Quinn novel, then wandered down to bus.

Spent the day at work. Didn't have any customers who stood out, but was visited by cactus_cat and jessikast after they'd finished work, and shoeless_girl knocked on the window as she passed just as I was closing. Failed to count float correctly - kept adding a $20 bill and a $30 bag of $2 coins together and getting $40. Did this three times. Eventually worked out problem and felt very, very stupid.

Went home, ate pizza, watched the final of Brat Camp from last night, knitted, failed to do the dishes. There is always tomorrow.

Would wish for nailgun or other appropriate method of slaughering random people who enter my shop but fear that I am too lazy to bother using it. And what good is a weapon if there isn't going to be a crime?

The shop I work at sells tee-shirts that say "FUCK OFF" in big block letters across the front. While personally I think that most tee-shirt slogans aren't nearly as funny or interesting or challenging as the people who purchase them seem to think, I do realise that they appeal to some people. For instance, shirts that say "FUCK OFF" tend to appeal to people who think that they are hard. Most people who are hard do not need their cheap tee-shirt to display this, but nevermind.

( So, at about eleven this morning, a dude walks in and checks out our mens' shirt rack.... )

I've never been asked out by a random stranger before... I was really quite chuffed about it, apart from the fact that I never would've said yes. Uhm. In retrospect, I think he was flirting with me right from the start, but I didn't notice. Whether this was because he was a man or because I don't think of myself as someone that would attract the sexual attention of random strangers, I don't know.

This evening, lasagne for dinner (so. fucking. good) and a documentary about New Zealand English (New Zild, coz that's the way we say it, you know?). Then CSI from last night and omg the ballet last night was so very cool. And St. James theater is so pretty! And I only have one day left of work this week, then two days off! Yay!