Reinventing my life

Well, I guess not reinventing my life, more of a reorganization of my life.

If you've been reading this, you can see that I have been working only part time in retail since May.  Which is actually pretty great for my health and sanity.  It lets me work on artistic and creative things, and it lets me get a good amount of sleep, and working retail means I am not sitting on my fat ass.  Well let's face it my flat ass.  I'm up and about.  And I like all of that.  It also gets me out of my house which is good for my emotional stability (if I was just not working I would live in a cave of blankets on my bed and not see other humans while I forced myself into a downward spiral of depression and an upward spiral of weight gain).

All of those are good things and mean that I have a life I am really pretty happy with.  I could list the reasons why my life is not flawless but who's life isn't flawless?  And that just gets petty.

So my life is good.  But it has also precipitated a bit of an identity crisis for me because I haven't been a person without an identity wrapped in my own work since I was in high school, probably before, even at points when I was unemployed but devoted to some thing.

But now I don't really have an identity that I feel comfortable sharing when people ask what do you do.

I don't want to say I'm a part-time manager at a large national home goods retail chain because although I do that and I enjoy, I don't think it reflects what I am.  Okay and maybe because I am a big snob.  And maybe because I am embarrassed to say that to fancy people with fancy jobs who ask me this when I am out with the fiancee who's fancy job let's me work part time.

I'm a quilter is tricky because I am just an amateur at that really.

I'm a stay at home cat mom, but that just makes me sound cuckoo bananas.  Although it sort of is the most true.  I am in planning to become a stay at home mom for whence we have babies in the future.  So I can't just stay home with the cat now.  I don't even really want to.  But I keep the place tidy, I make dinners and stock the fridge and run the show and do volunteer work.  All of which would be acceptable as my life IF I had a baby or two, but I don't so I worry that I sound like a spoiled baby myself (and maybe I am, maybe that is the root of the crisis).

I don't even know exactly what I would want to be.

Well, that's not entirely true.  I would like to be a romance novelist.  I have several bits and pieces of novels, some of which are total crap and others that could be a good novel if I ever finished them.  Before I didn't have time.  Now I do, and if I set down to finishing them and refining them, I think--no I KNOW--I could get them published.  And if I could replace my part time job income with a novelist income (I'm not looking to be Jennifer Weiner or Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele, I am just looking for a few books a year from like Blaze or Harlequin) then I would have my ideal life.  I think (I know, I am so non-specific about this).

So that is the root of the reorganization.  Changing/structuring the life I have today to give me time to/force me to write on the novels, so that someday soon I will have one to submit to publishers so that by the time I quit work to have babies or adopt babies or whatever, novelist income will be sufficient that I never have to go out and get a job again.

The reorg means no more sleeping in for no reason and getting up at a regular time each day.  It means voicing the secret goals so someone somewhere will hold me accountable to them just by checking in on my status.  It means using time to write each week a few days a week for a few hours a week.  Which technically is what I should be doing now.  But I plan to build all these steps in slowly so I work my way up into a habit (like I've done with flossing and my nightly face routine).  I need to learn to walk before I enter a marathon.

Back from California

I had fun in the sun with my family. It was great to see my brother and sister and mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and aunt and uncle and like ninety cousins and a bunch of other relatives--even a few from the Greek side. But it was a very quick trip--on the plus side my four hour flight back to Chicago was so empty everyone got their own rows, which is how I like to fly for four hours.

The park dedication was lovely and I got to release a butterfly at it (it is a bug and butterfly themed park), and I played on a bunch of the toys. Even climbed to the top of the rope structure (while my mom yelled at me to hold on to my brothers hand because clearly I was unable to climb a structure meant for children without help, also climbing a rope ladder is easier when holding on to something other than the rope ladder).

Now I face a week of tech rehearsals and runs for my next episode which I admit to being less than ready for. Plus too much working. Turns out a different manager is doing the schedule for my other job and he didn't know I only work 12 hours a week. So that would explain the 16 hour weeks lately. However, we had a little chat, so that might be fixed soon.

Long weekend

Although I will work through part of it. It will be a moving weekend too as we move Luke Daigle in and move Jon and Sara to new digs. Plus Chris and I will have a Chris and Heather day on Monday.

Also, my lovely friend Holly got me free tickets to Cymbeline next week at the Chicago Shakespeare Festival. Hopefully it will be better then the other show that I saw there.

Work has been ridiculous this week! Today I got emails pertaining to how rude and unprofessional I am and how diligent and professional I am. Crazy person, super crazy person is the one who emailed me (well, really the CFO and then she emailed my boss and I) about me being rude, but really she is rude. I was trying to help her, and I was trying to keep her out of my hunt by asking her to sit in reception while I checked on things, but she refused to sit down and instead she followed me around and hovered outside my office and just kept coming into it. Ugh, it was infuriating, and I could find no one to help me out because it all happened before 8:45 in the morning. No one else was in here yet.

The other one was a problem I solved that was created by an idiot who used to work here but left last month. He took a check from a woman, but then never bothered to tell accounting that there was a check buried in the middle of some paperwork. So we were harassing her about non-payment. I felt terrible. So, I figured things out, fixed it, apologized, let her believe the other guy basically got fired for fucking things up (totally not true, but totally something you would read into my email if you were pissed), blamed the idiot, and reassured her we had replaced him with far more competent people (again, not so much true, his replacement also kind of a tool).

Awesome. I love work and stupid people. Mostly I love stupid people. [pause] Psych.

Woo Hooo Storm!

We had a biggun last night/yesterday! You may have seen it on TV. Lots of people are without power, and my work is kind of one of them. I say kind of because we have just enough power for ComEd not to worry about fixing us, but not enough power for screen print production to work and barely enough power to do anything in embroidery, also there is no air conditioning. Yeah, it is awesome here. Not really.

Ummmm, but at least I am at work. Also someone is buying us doughnuts. That's good right?

Horoscope widget

On my igoogle homepage, I have a widget for my horoscope. I put it one there because I thought it would be fun and funny and a nice silly way to greet the morning at work. Now I am not so sure, because this Rick Levine guy is following me. He must be, plus he is probably listening to my thoughts because it has been creepy right on lately! I mean, I guess it could all be vague enough to be read into, but it also seems to be focusing on topics or situations that are at the forefront of my mind right now. It is kind of freaking me out.

Thank you for all the lovely feedback on my headshots (comments on Wranglers notwithstanding, yeah Lauren I am looking at you). I actually will probably use the two that you all like the most as my main two shots.

Hopefully I will blog more next week when I won't have worked over 40 hours by the time I got to bed on Wednesday night (and I haven't even seen "My Boys" yet!

The internet in my apartment is ran by satan

I swear, just when we have it fixed, it gives up the ghost. However, my roommate Janna is the one who must deal with it, and she is gone until tomorrow. So this is a quick one from work.

Although, I am worrying about the fact that now that I think on it, it may have been connected to the internet but my browser just wasn't playing nicely. That could be a whole other problem. Well, crap.

Also, I might have to work at Pier 1 tonight because someone may or may not be quitting by just not showing up. That sucks, especially because I know it will impinge upon my freedom later in the summer too. Unless we freaking hire some people already!

Also, still keep forgetting to purchase birthday gift for a roommate who's birthday was almost a week ago now. I know what I want. I am just not getting my ass in gear enough.

Perhaps I brought it on myself.

The receptionist did not come to work today (this is like her third or fourth missed day for not really any good reason as far as anyone can tell since she started near then end of March). Also, she missed last Wednesday. Plus she probably won't be there tomorrow. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that she may quit soon--you know, assuming she is not released from her position.

This just sucks. Because I did her job today and mine. I got there at 8:30, I didn't take a lunch, and I left at 6:20--working straight through the whole time. Good news, I will get some pretty sick overtime until we get a new receptionist. Bad news, this is exhausting. Fortunately, the reception job is not terribly taxing. However combined with my job, it is a lot of stuff to wade through everyday. It was especially bad because I stayed until I got everything done that I needed to do today. I had too since I don't know when or if she was coming back, and if I left stuff up in the air, I would've just been screwing myself. So, so, SO not fun. And more tomorrow.

This is what I get for shrugging to Renee that I have just the right amount of stuff to do. Well, not anymore. Tonight she stayed and helped me. I was grateful for her help. I needed it.

New responsibilities

Today is the day that I got an email for work. My very own email with my name--actually two emails that are routed to the same place, the highly technical hkinion and heather @ my work. This means I can send out info on behalf of the company and ask for stuff which means people will respond to me and expect me to have answers. This is where it gets tricky because although I have some answers, I am still new enough that I really, really don't have some other answers--even really obvious ones.

The good news is that I have a lot more to do each day. Today I only spent about two hours reading stuff on the internet and blogging and reading my book as compared to six and a half yesterday. Having more to do is actually nice. It seems like it would be more fun to have nothing to do all day and get paid for it, but when you can't leave your chair (well, you can but like to go to the bathroom or drop a note off and not much more), it gets less and less fun. Plus everyone else is working, and somewhere between 2 hours and six and a half hours of goofing off it goes from fun to uselessness.

Back to work, everyone have a banana on me.

Today I was just this much too fast

I had plenty to do, but I got a big pile at the start of the day and worked really hard to get through it fairly quickly--in anticipation of more work later. But then I didn't get any more work. Oh well.

It has been freaking gorgeous weatherwise for the last few days. Although I can see through the glass door that it is no longer gorgeous. It might not be cold yet, but I can see the colder weather rolling in. Somehow, I don't really mind that much. I know that the worst of the winter weather is now well behind us, and this will be temporary at best. We might have even turned off the heat for good at our apartment. Yeah, take that. Actually if it gets cold enough tonight, I bet we will all wuss out and turn it back on. I don't like to be really cold.