I think I need a t-shirt

Today is my one year anniversary at my job. I expect it to come and go without much fanfare. The truth of the matter is that this is a major accomplishment for me. Back in September I didn't think I'd be able to make it until Christmas. Of course this was before the department switch and all that. Now with my term ending it looks like I'll be back to my old job. Either that or I venture off to some other company. Or potentially to grad school. Or some other sort of education.

Yeah there are a lot of options but I'm just not a decision maker. The best recent example of this was last week when I was in Safeway. I walked past the bacon, turned around look at the bacon, picked up the package of bacon and then discovered that turkey bacon was on sale. In the end I bought both.

The other thing that stopping me from packing up is that I want to go traveling next summer which will require large sums of money which will likely prevent me from going back to school but a different job is not out of the question if the current one becomes unbearable.

Series Hotties: San Jose vs Dallas

I'm calling this the "people who look like other people edition" of my series hotties because every single one of these guys looks like someone I know. Additionally I would normally add Patrick Marleau but his official mugshot was pretty bad this year.


3. Brad Winchester- Dallas


2. Chris Conner- Dallas


1. Brian Boucher- San Jose

Reminding myself why I go to work everyday.

As some of you are aware last week I had a bit of a meltdown with regards to my working situation. Well I've had the whole weekend to reflect and quite frankly I don't feel much better about it. However my mother reminded me why I have to continue working for at least another year.

Goal of the Week

Reviewing last week's goal Well I finished my Accounting assignment but obviously I don't understand any of it. So I most definatly need to review this before I write my final.

This week's goal is to watch a least one late playoff game. I've watched bits and pieces of some of them but haven't been able to make it through a whole one yet.

Series Hotties: Montreal - Philadelphia

As with most of these I have to first post a disclaimer. I share a special bond with Braydon Coburn of the Flyers. You see he is exactly 6 months younger than me (no to the hour or anything). In order to properly celebrate my un-birthday in rez I went out and got an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen and had them do lettering that said "Happy un/birthday Janalee and Braydon. I think I took pictures but I'm pretty sure I didn't have them developed. Anyway I just wanted to get that out before I start.

Oh wait I have slightly more disclosure to add. I once voted for a guy for president of university's student union because he looked like Scottie Upshall. Everytime I think about that I'm reminded of an episode of Clone High where JFK is running for student body president against Abe, and during one of his speeches he say "ask not what your student body president can do for you, but what you can do to you student body president's body".

3) Braydon Coburn - Philly


2) Mike Richards - Philly



1) Scottie Upshall - Philly

Series Hotties: Colorado - Detroit

First of all I'd like to say that I'm going to try to finish these all before the end of the series. We'll see how it goes. The first round sucked. I think it's just because I fell behind and then I was a little depressed when Ottawa lost. All better now, as I've chosed Montreal as my backup team.

Here's the think about Colorado. I used to be an Avs fan. I blame my brother who was a huge Nordiques fan and also recently acquired an Avalanche jersey from my closet, because let's face it no one wears jerseys anymore except in the comfort of thier own home while watching the game. Anyway as I'm going through the roster I'm thinking "oh I love (insert name of Avs player), but he's not hot."

So I'm going with a top 3 here:

3) Marek Svatos - Colorado



2) Jonathan Ericsson - Detroit



1) Andreas Lilja - Detroit

Holy Crap, What Did I Do To My Back?

All afternoon I have had a terrible pain the right side of my lower back. I just haven't figured out what I did to it. I would have said it was from the heavy lifting I did on the weekend but I was perfectly fine yesterday. Anyway as you know I'm all about the complaining so here's some more.

Really it hurts to do anything. It hurts to walk and it hurts to sit. If I can make it through another half hour I'll check lying down. I'd try it now but I'm at work and I'm afraid that I won't be able to get up off the floor, in which case I'd have to spend the night here. Ain't gonna happen.

Goal of the week

Once again we'll start by reviewing last week's goal. You know if I hadn't gone away on Friday I probably would have finished but it's still not quite finished.

Also because I did go away I didn't post a goal of the week for this week. I'm going back about 2 weeks to when I was supposed to finish my accounting assignment for this weeks goal. There are 2 reasons for this:

1. By my calculations, in order for me to finish the course on time I have to send this assignment away this week.
2. It's already Sunday so I only have 5 days to complete goals that I normally give myself 7 days for.

Sometimes I wonder if I've got brain damage

As I'm working on my playoff hotties series I'm finding that I have to go through every teams roster to figure out who's hot and who's not. There was a time when I would have been able to go team by team and name these players from memory. What happened? But that is not the point of this particular post.

The point here is actually that as I go through them I certainly recognize names. It's hard not to when you've been doing this for eight years. As I recognize names I recall things like "oh he's hot" or "no definatly not hot" before I actually pull up the pictures. Then when the page acutally loads I find myself thinking that most of the guys that I remember as being hot actually aren't.

Is it just that they're getting old and I'm getting older and my tastes have changed? Probably not. When I reflect on all of the people that I've ever had crushes on I almost always think "what was I thinking?" Maybe it's just me trying to make myself feel better when things don't work out with a particular crush but the way I go through them I don't think I've really got time to have become attached in the first place.

Series Hottie: Montreal - Boston

This one was kind of difficult as these are two teams that I definitely don't pay any attention too normally. Not to mention that I've been a horrible hockey fan this year.

Anyway the winner is Milan Lucic.

Oh Crap.

So I was working on finding the series hottie for the Montreal-Boston series and I had settled on Vladimir Sobotka. However when I started looking for pictures to post I found this picture:



Does he look a little bit like someone that lives in Rez? I'm becoming afraid.

Series Hottie: Pittsburgh vs Ottawa

I realized about 5 minutes ago that I haven't done my playoff series hotties yet. I'm starting with Ottawa and Pittsburgh because well Ottawa is very likely getting the boot tonight.

I think I'm going to have to go against all good judgement here and pick Sidney Crosby. I don't like Sidney Crosby but I can't really deny that he's hot. Normally this would be where I would pick Wade Redden yet again. However I did take Antoine Vermette last year.

Sure he looks a little young here. But that's just possibly because he is.

More complaining about work

It's not the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last time I use my blog as an outlet for all of my career related frustrations. Today however I feel justified in questioning the division of the workload. While I don't generally question it out loud to co-workers it certainly comes up in outside of work relationships. Okay that statement isn't exactly true, I do mention it to co-workers just not ones that actually work in my department.

Some told me last week that I shouldn't question what I'm given to do and that I should just take it and stay late to get everything done if need be. All because you're trying to start your career and you don't want people to think you can't do the job. The fact of the matter is that I'm the kind of person who believes that you're only assigned as much as people think you're able to do. And that if you're not able to do it then someone needs to know.

I'm one of those lucky people who has most of their work delivered to their desk, either by e-mail or fax. Today our fax delivery person asked me about all of the stuff I was getting these days. The big thing was that all of this work had been assigned to other people at some point but now is falling on me. In fact she even said to me "so what does Sally* do now?" If other people are noticing then all of my complaining can't be completely unjustified right?


*name changed to protect my freaking job. Not that I'm so anonymous as it is.

Is it too early to give up on my team?

As you all know by now I'm a bit of a sports nut. There are some sports that I just can't get into, NBA basketball for example. To clarify I say NBA basketball because I do watch college basketball, or at least I do in March. One sport that I am way into is hockey. I've loved hockey since I was about 12. Right around the time I quit figure skating. I should say here that I'm a terrible hockey player. But I do enjoy watching it.

This year has been a really bad year for my hockey fandom. Part of the problem is that I just have no energy anymore. It used to be that Saturday nights for me involved me, my couch and the Hockey Night in Canada double-header. This year I think I've watched about 4 regular season games, but I promised myself I'd watch at least one game a night through the playoffs. So far so good on that front.

However watching my favorite team, the Ottawa Senators, get destroyed by the Penguins is brutal. The first game and a half the Senators just played poorly. Last night, well I don't even know what happened last night. It was all tied at 1-1. It seemed like I went to switch my laundry and suddenly it was 3-1.

The series is now 3-0 for Pittsburgh and I'm ready to give up on my Senators. I guess I'm not being much of a fan but really they're not giving me a whole lot to work with.

Goal of the Week

First an update on last week's goal of the week . Well I DID write my test, but I didn't finish the Chapter 10 assignment. Come on first of all there was the Final Four and National Championship game and then NHL playoffs started this week. Plus I had that work thing that I have to do to pay the bills.

This week's goal of the week is to finish the left front of the sweater that I'm knitting. I've been working on this sweater since pretty February. It's still not done. I've had a lot of other stuff going on. So left front this week. It should work out pretty well because I can work on it while I'm watching hockey.

I knew I shouldn't have given this URL to people

People always bug me about how no one reads my blog. So of course in an effort to increase readership (to more than one) I give the URL to people that I know who might want to hear what I have to say. Everytime I do it, I start to feel like I have to censor what I plan to say so as not to offend anyone or to do harm to whatever sort of career it is that I have.

The fact of the matter is that the thing that I've spent more time thinking about lately than anything else is something that I would have no problem telling an absolute stranger but something that I can't tell people that I consider friends.

Just so no one feels upset or left out here let me just say it has to deal with new office crush. And by new I mean new, new. It's not that I've necessarily given up on old office crush it's just that I have exactly no attention span so when something new comes up I get really excited about it and leave the old stuff. This easily explains things like the seasonal athlete boyfriends. Out of sight out of mind. Actually I think I tend to overanalyze stuff until it gets to the point where I almost have to leave it alone otherwise it gets far too awkward. Focus is a good thing. Becoming obsessed on a singular focus probably not so much of a good thing.

Anyway I just wanted to get that off my chest and hopefully it explains some of why I haven't posted anything lately. I'm not trying to say don't read my blog. I'm just trying to shed some light on why I probably shouldn't have a blog in the first place.

So hotness bracket was right.

It predicted Kansas and that's what we got. For the record it also predicted the Davidson run and it's ending by Kansas. It didn't do so well anywhere else though.

Teams left in my bracket:abso-freaking-lutely none

way to fall 20 points behind and then have to attempt to climb out of a rather large hole UNC. And what the hell the National Player of the Year doesn't have to block shots because he's National Player of the Year or what?

I think that deserves more Tyler Hansbrough crying:


I don't blame UCLA though, Memphis was just better. That's all.

Goal of the Week

First a update on last week's goal. I managed to stick with the Starbucks tall all week. I DID cheat a little and go with a Grande Frappuchino after work yesterday but with the kind of day I had a freaking deserved it.

As for this week. My goal is to write my accounting test and finish the assignment for chapter 10 and send it to my instructor.

That's the great thing about distance ed you can do stuff when you want to. It also helps that it's a community college so they have no actual testing dates either. Which means I can write them pretty much whenever I want.

I also need to register for courses for May but a still have a little bit of time to do that yet. I'm almost done my certificate and then I've got to figure out what to do after that.

I should NOT be at work today

I'm having such a bad day today. I've only been at work for 2 hours and already I'm pissed off. I've already ranted on how people don't do anything that could possibly be outside of the very specific parameters of their job and how they like to pass the buck. That's fine I can live with that, sure I get angry about it sometimes but it's not so bad. Worse though is when they screw up and it affects something that is within the parameters of your job and they forget to mention it to you.

This leads to you looking like you don't know how to do your job even though you actually DID do your job (and properly might I add) to external individuals. Maybe I shouldn't be so upset but I spent half an hour doing research about something that could have been a simple e-mail 2 weeks ago that would have fixed the problem long before anyone on the outside even noticed.

I'd like to think that I'm just in a bad mood because my day started off crappy. First of all I didn't sleep well last night. Really this is probably my fault as I stayed up too late chatting to people online. Though for the first time in about a week and a half I didn't have the disturbing co-worker dream. You know the one that I obsess over during my waking hours.

Secondly it was really icy outside this morning and I fell about a block from my bus stop. My hand looks perfectly fine but it hurts like hell. Thirdly, it seems like everything that I have to do this morning requires a phone call. Which I don't feel like making due to the first and second points, plus I have a sore throat. I should just go home.

Crappy Facebook Applications

I'm one of those lucky people who doesn't have Facebook blocked at work. This means that I'm able to spend a good part of my day keeping up to date with all of the things that my friends are doing as well as taking advantage of some of the wonderful (and also some not so wonderful) Facebook Apps.

This is great unless those applications are down. For example I found this great application called "Knighthood". The great thing about in in connection to the ability to do work is that you can set your buildings to build/expand and it tells you exactly how long it will take. So you only need to go back to it for a few seconds to set the next one. So today one of the projects was finishing up while I was on coffee break so I figure great I'll set the next build when I get back. It's been down for 2 hours since so my building should be done and I could have been 2 hours into the next one but now I'm not.

Well That makes me feel better.

Just yesterday I was saying how bad I felt about changing college basketball boyfriends so quickly. But today not so much. This is a story that even the boys at work could enjoy even if they don't understand the full implications of the story.

As you know I had chosen David McClure of Duke as my college basketball boyfriend. I've since switched but that doesn't really matter to my story. So today I got off the bus on my way to work and walked through the square as I always do and there was a pretty grubby looking guy (I want to say bum but he wasn't really) wearing a Duke jacket.

Even funnier though was on the back where it was supposed to say Blue Devils, Devils had been cut out. The word had actually been cut out of the jacket leaving a rectangular hole in the back where the jacket lining was showing.