Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

12-05-03
So I haven't had a real, personal update in a while, but that's because nothing much is going on in my life. I'm in South Bend, I still don't have a job. That about sums up my last few weeks. Enjoy.

11-24-03

11-18-03
You know Christmas is almost here when...
W.A.T.C.H. comes out with its annual 10 Worst Toys list. It was a moment of nostalgic happiness to see that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy made the list, but it again raises the question in my mind, "When did the Turtles suddenly get so popular again?"

UPDATE: This has nothing to do with turtles, but I've added stuff to the links page, and I've added some more of my writing to the my work page - stuff about Sydney and kangaroo rats.

11-12-03
So, for a few days now at work the Saga of the File Cabinet has been developing. There are several different file cabinets at work, but the one at the center of the Saga is one of those types with the push-in locks, so to lock it you only have to push the protruding lock part, and to open it you need a key. Jodi, one of my supervisors, accidentally pushed in the lock a few days ago.

More about this particular filing cabinet: there's no key.

Our plans to unlock it started small. Mostly to avoid having to do end weights for organic matter, I decided to see what could be done with paper clips. I proved quickly that I had no idea what I was doing, and moved on to a sample scoop, and then a screwdriver. Nothing worked, and I eventually wandered away.

Some time later, I heard the drill.

Ed, one of my other supervisors, decided that drilling the lock might work. He, of course, eventually broke the drill bit. I'm not sure how long that took, since it seemed like the drilling went on for 20 minutes or so. So now the lock has a gaping hole in it, but still won't open.

I eventually realize that, instead of the drill, all I hear is a loud pounding. Matt, Jodi's brother, had retrieved the crowbar from his car and someone was dilligently beating the crap out of the filing cabinet drawer. Apparently the crowbar was the correct tool, for the drawer soon opened. The corner of the drawer was sticking out at a 90-degree angle, but at least it was opened. They eventually banged it back into place.

What I don't understand is why they did what they did next. Even though the drawers were able to be opened, the locking mechanism still worked, and they decided that using duct tape to hold it in the unlocked position would be wise.

Of course, the next day, we discovered that the cabinet, even with the gaping hole in the lock, had become relocked. The duct tape had failed.

I think the process of re-opening the cabinet involved more drilling... all I know is that when I checked it again, there was a wide assortment of tools such as a hammer, a bent screwdriver, and what I'm pretty sure was a railroad spike sitting on top of the cabinet. Sitting next to these items was the lock itself, which had somehow been removed. Yet the cabinet was still in the lock position.

Matt eventually fixed that by using the bent screwdriver to lever the locking mechanism into the open position. When we got the drawer open we saw that the duct tape had been ripped through.

What possibly is the most amusing aspect of this is that Jodi didn't actually have to get into the drawer. She just wanted to store stuff in it. Also amusing is that this could have been easily resolved, in less time, with a call to the locksmith.

11-05-03

"This chick's rockin' your bro on the dance floor.
But she's towing an anchor.
A junior investment banker.
Who's talkin' about herself and not much more.
Oh-oh-oh
So buy her a beer,
it's the reason you're here:
Mighty Wingman
You're taking one for the team,
so your buddy can live the dream:
Wingmaaaaa-AAAAA-aaaaannnnn..."

Man, that commercial just kills me. It also makes me wonder whether the same thing happens with girls. See, I've never gone out and picked someone up at a bar, and I've never been with a girl looking to pick someone up at a bar. I know that the stereotype is for girls to "cockblock" but do they ever play Wingman (or Wingwoman) for each other? Or do girls who go out together selfishly go after the first man they can find without helping their single friend get laid?

Also, I just visited Keith's rambles and decided to take the Which Random Cult Movie Character Are You? quiz. Keith was Ash from the Evil Dead movies. I was... Tetsuo, from "Akira." Ummm... who the fuck is Tetsuo?

11-04-03
Holy crap! Updates two days in a row!

Thought I would tell you all about my job, although I'm sure most of the people reading this will find it incredibly boring. So I work in a soil testing lab. Technically, I work for Land O' Lakes, which owns the lab. To answer your next question, no, we do not deal with butter or any other dairy products. We work with soil, and only soil.

The purpose of this lab is to take soil sent in by farmers and test it for various things, such as percentage of organic matter, pH, and elemental content. I spend most of my time working with organic matter and pH. To give you a better idea of this lab, think back to any chem lab you've been in. Now, imagine this on an industrial-sized scale after MacGyver has tinkered with all the equipment. This image is important because while the lab is busiest from October to November, the rest of the year is spent tweaking equipment and coming up with new ways to make things run efficiently. Yearly, the lab processes around 80,000 samples.

So with organic matter, I have a tray with 60 tiny crucibles. The organic matter process takes approximately 4 hours, not counting time needed to weigh each of the crucibles. When I get to work, I spend my mornings weighing crucibles and putting the trays into a furnace (5 trays stacked go into each furnace). We have nifty little timers to mark off the 2 hours that the crucibles (which are filled with soil, by the way) must stay in the furnace. Obviously, it sucks if you spill a crucible near the end of the 4-hour period.

Side note, my timers keep getting jacked by the people who scoop the soil samples. This bothers me because once you set a timer to two hours, as long as you let it run out, you can hit the "Start/Stop" button and two hours will appear again without having to reset, which takes forever (OK, not forever, but long enough to make me impatient). I discovered today who does this - the woman who is the leader of the scoopers. She apparently thinks she needs all the timers to be at the first station and set to an hour. While she will never need more than 4 to 6 timers at any given time, she thinks she needs 10. I had to refrain from beating her to death with my own shoe.

When I'm not doing organic matter, I'm testing pH. I would go into detail but I'm getting tired. The pH process is much less time-consuming than the organic matter process, but more complex because I have to stop every ten trays to clean the freakin' pH probes. Stupid lab rules...

I hope to have a job in South Bend soon, so I can actually live in the same place as my husband. I will be in South Bend this weekend for the Notre Dame/Navy game and tailgating fun.

11-03-03
It has again been a couple of weeks since I updated, but I again have good reason. Two weeks ago Neil and I decided at the last moment that we should move. So in a week, he packed up the apartment, and we moved our stuff to South Bend. Yes, we'll probably be in South Bend for a while, as Neil is planning on going to Notre Dame for law school. He also has a job in South Bend already, putting him way ahead of me.

I've been working in Indy, which was unfortunate while I was in Bloomington since I had to get up at 4:45 a.m. every day to be there by 6:30 a.m. Now, I'm staying with Jon and Lisa, and I'm a little closer. I don't need to leave until 5:45 a.m. now, so I get a little more sleep time.

I would write more, and I should, but I'm really tired and I want to get some sleep. More later.

10-18-03
So in the interest of keeping this page from getting too damn long, I've added an archive page, should you show any interest in my prior ramblings. Follow the ARCHIVE link in the menu bar to the left and you can see stuff. I'll try to dump this page once a month. I've also updated the PEOPLE page.

Other than that, not much else going on. We're picking Laura up at the airport in Indy tomorrow, so she can get an Indiana driver's license for reasons too detailed to go into right now. In doing so we have to time our trip to avoid the majorly large fuselage of some sort of military plane that's being transported from Ohio to Nebraska and will be making its way across Indy at about the same time we'll be trying to get to the airport. This plane will be taking up 2+ lanes on 465 and generally making travel difficult.

My new job starts Monday, I'll let you know how that went.

SOMETHING NEW AND COOL! Screw the separate blog, I've decided... I've set it up so you can leave comments at the end of each entry on this page. Do I rock or what?

10-13-03
So it's been a couple of weeks since I updated, but I have good reason for this, as I have been back and forth between here and South Bend for scuba classes, babysitting, and a wedding. So this update is going to be incredibly long as I recount events.

SCUBA: I took the first part of my scuba training, which involved taking a few quizzes and a test, then going to a pool to work with the equipment. I'm proud to say that I got a 100 on my exam. Go me! The pool work was fun, although we had to be in Bridgman, Michigan at 7 a.m. This meant leaving my parents' house at 6:15 a.m. I'm only half done with my scuba, since I still need to do open-water dives, and I can't do that until spring now.

CHILD CARE: Neil and I spent a few days this week watching the scuba shop since Kathy had to go to Florida for a convention. We also looked after her children during the day while Gene, her husband, was at work. This was exciting mainly because the children are home schooled, so we had to teach them. Neil is proud because he taught Keepher 13 and 14. I worked on Erika with money. Teaching them was somewhat nerve-wracking, since their education was in our hands for three days, and because I always felt a stab of fear whenever Gene would ask them what they learned, worried that they would say 'Nothing.'

SPIDERS: Emily, who had her own spider battle, will appreciate this. So my parents' house is across the street from a bog on one side and a field/scrubby forest on another. This means that when it gets cold there is a mass exodus of creepy crawly things from these locations to the house. One evening this week we found a very large, very dead spider in our room. I looked in my bug book later and I think it was a rabid wolf spider (they aren't actually rabid or anything, that's just their name). This thing was about an inch and a half to two inches from leg to leg. I found this horrifying. I found it more horrifying when, a couple of days later, I reached down to pick up my purse off the floor and found another one, this time alive. I stared at it for a while and came to the conclusion that I would be better off killing it, because if I fled in terror and it vanished, I would never be able to sleep in that room again. So I put on a boot that had no grooves on the bottom (so that when I crushed it, it couldn't hide between them and then eat through my shoe, into my foot, and make its way to my brain), and then stared at the spider for a long time. So long, in fact, that Neil finally came looking for me, as we had been about to leave when I found the spider. We both stared at the spider for a while until Neil was finally able to grind it into the carpet with his shoe.

WEDDING: On Saturday our friends Brad and Mary got married. This was exciting for obvious reasons, but it was also fun because it's the first wedding I've been to in a while where I didn't have a role such as bridesmaid or bride. Mary asked me to take care of a few things behind the scenes, make sure things got picked up, etc., but once I hit the reception I was free to drink. And drink I did. Myself, Jess, and Hannah (Rob's girlfriend) made a pact to drink $100 worth of alcohol between us (it was an open bar, so we decided to estimate based on bar prices). The three of us each had four drinks before dinner even started, so we were pretty toasted while eating. I got fairly drunk, then sobered up, then got drunk again. It was a blast.

JOBS: Hey, I've got a job! Granted, it's a temporary job, but it's full time, in a lab, doing stuff related to my degree! I'm working for a soil testing lab, examining post-harvest soils (not to be mistaken for post-harvest souls, which Jess amusingly thought at first - as far as I know, my future employer is not Death). It starts tomorrow, so I'm pumped. It's also a second shift job, so I don't have to get up insanely early to get to Indy.

9-24-03
Lawks.

9-21-03
Neil and I went to Kentucky Kingdom yesterday, which was a lot of fun. On the trip there, I saw something I had never witnessed before. It was on 65 just north of Louisville, where there's a lot of construction. Traffic was painfully slow, and for some reason was being narrowed to one lane. The reason for this was a semi that, from behind, looked as though it had fallen into a hole, because the back section of the bed was in the air. As we passed it we saw what had really happened - the cargo, a large wheel-shaped thingy, apparently became too heavy and broke the bed of the truck, causing the back portion to be in the air rather than on the ground where it belonged. Never seen that before.

The park itself was also fun. Since Neil doesn't ride roller coasters, and I don't ride them alone, we spent the day on all the spinny rides. I think what amused me most during the day happened during our second (yes, second) foray into the Thrill Park Theater. It's one of those places where you watch a movie, and your seats move, so that you feel like you're moving along with the picture. Before that, they show you a video to give background info. This particular show was about how Dino Island, discovered 4 years earlier, was about to explode due to volcanic activity, and the efforts to evacuate the dinosaurs. So we're there watching the tape again, and there's this older guy ahead of us. They get to the part of the tape where the news anchor loses contact with his correspondent, and says something like, "We seem to have lost the connection." To which this guy announces "Oh, no" in the most amusing tone of voice, really loud. Somehow he managed to sound really concerned even though his intent was sarcastic. When the connection was reestablished and the anchor reported this, the guy responded with "Oh, good" in the same tone of voice. He cracked me up.

We also discovered that one of the gift shops was having a mega sale on its items. We got little stuffed animals of Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester, Tweety, Taz, the Coyote and the Roadrunner for $6.30. This was a good deal, considering that normally they were around $10 each (except for Tweety, which we got small so that he would be correctly proportional to Sylvester). Unfortunately, they did not have any George dolls, and were out of Marvin the Martian.

Neil and I also drove the Go Karts, which I had never done before. Neil claims to have beat me, but I let him get ahead of me. Really, I did. Honest.

9-18-03
Woohoo, I've had the first official "I may regret something I did at your wedding" conversation!

rob says: cool -- did you get the video back yet?
becky says: nope, we need to call the guy
rob says: before you see my little rant on there, can I go on record as saying I was really hammered?
becky says: LOL... what did you say???
rob says: see that is the thing....
rob says: I am not really sure, I mean I remember my opening line....and then .....well.......I dont' know after that

That's from Rob, one of Neil's groomsmen. If you'd like to hear some stories about Rob tonight and possibly every night, check out his radio show with his girlfriend Hannah from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. Eastern Time tonight and every Thursday night!

9-15-03
Hey, I was productive today! Well, sort of. I finished three job applications. One was for a job at the FBI academy, and the others were in Maine and Dayton, Ohio. I spent much time reworking my résumé too.

I also spent a good amount of time in moral outrage at one of the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities questions posed on the FBI application. I was asked to describe my ability to evaluate information and then make judgments/decisions. What?!!?? Why not just ask me my ability to be alive? There is no answer to this question that doesn't make a person look like a total moron.

Tomorrow we're going to Chicago to pick up Neil's brother at the bus station. This is going to involve copious amounts of driving on our part. But hey, who doesn't love Chicago bus stations at midnight?

Update: I've started adding stuff to MY WORK. They will be in .pdf format for now until I get tired of that or I run out of room.

9-13-03
Dear God, I have a blog. Why do I have a blog? I don't know. Maybe I want some validation of my existence, which can come through people leaving comments.
Hey Alison: Fooled you!! See, I updated TWO DAYS IN A ROW.
Also: links don't work yet. Deal. Update: People is up now. Update the second: Hey, we've got some links!

9-12-03
All right, so I'm being lazy and using the basic editor on Angelfire. I promise you, though, I do know HTML. I have my Coder's Union 442 card here somewhere, honest.

OK, those of you who know me, know me. Those who don't, well, people who don't know me are most likely not reading this page, so I'm debating whether I should give a brief bio. The Web address says Rebekah, but those who know better call me Becky or Bek. I just graduated from IU with two Master's degrees, one in Journalism and one in Environmental Science. You'd think I would have a job with those credentials. Sadly, no. I also recently got married, so cyberstalkers back off! Bwahahaha! I will, eventually, post links to Neil's Web site as well as sites that my friends claim to maintain (ahem, Tim).

So, I like writing. And I use the word "so" a little too much. But that's not the point. I figure that if I'm not busting my ass writing for some daily newspaper, I should at least be posting something to the Web to prove that I do indeed got skillz, yo. (Future employers can ignore that last "skillz, yo".) I will endeavor to use this Web site to let me friends know that I still live, and to get some more practical experience in writing. So it'll be a bit bloggish, but a personal blog that no one else can butt in on, unless I decide to add comments. I'm going to start with a run down of recent events in Louisville, Kentucky. No, I do not live there. But Neil and I were there last weekend at a release party for a magazine started by some of my old J-School pals and some of their relatives. It's called The Ville Magazine, since it's centered in Louisville. As far as I can tell they have no Web site yet, so no link for you!

The day's schedule was thus: Party at Hooter's, fashion show, party at club. Neil and I went down with our friends Brian H. and Kaitlyn (whose name I still don't know how to spell, I'm really sorry about that). Brian H. was also in the J-School. Once we got to Hooter's we met up with Val and Brian Z., who currently live in Florida but also work for the magazine. We haven't seen them in several years, so it was a grand meeting. We also met up with Bryan H., Brian Z.'s siblings, and others we had not seen in a while. In case you're wondering, Brian is a very popular name among this group. So the last initials are not to protect the innocent, but to help keep them straight.

After an eventful trip to the hotel, in which the car we were following took two wrong turns to get there, we chilled for a while, caught up a little, and Neil got to watch the Notre Dame game, which made him happy. We weren't going to stay, but our friends were kind enough to put us up at the hotel. We love our friends!

The fashion show was held at the glassworks building, I believe on the eighth floor. The most important thing I have to say about the fashion show is: My God, the shoes. It wasn't one of those boring fashion shows where we have to watch people on a runway. They had platforms by the windows, and the models would stand there for a while, then switch. They had amazing shoes. However, the best shoes of the evening belonged to a guest, Ella (sp?). She had an amazing outfit too, but she was wearing these sparkly jewel-encrusted strappy sandals. If I had a picture... I may have to draw them for you.

OK, so there was more to the show than shoes. Like free booze and food. Chocolate covered strawberries are excellent. So is vodka and cranberry juice. Side note, I tried vodka and Red Bull for the first time, and it was awful. If I want a drink that tastes like cough medicine, I'll drink me some cherry NyQuil. I got fairly drunk, in part because Val's brother Roger was too nice of a guy. He would magically appear whenever my drink was empty and ask if I wanted another, then fight his way through the crowd and reappear eventually with my drink. I had at least five or six drinks.

We eventually took limos to a club called Atmosphere, although they spell it @mosphere. Clever, aren't they? So we drank some more and I eventually realized I should stop, so Neil and I sat in a corner sipping water and discussing politics. We took a cab back to the hotel and ordered pizza. When you're drunk, pizza is the yummiest food in existence. Eventually, Val, Brians Z. and H., and Kaitlyn showed up and ate pizza too. The Brians tried to bribe the desk clerks to let us into the pool... however, they thought a $20 would do it. Neil and I figured they would need at least three figures. The Brians got denied. That was our wild night in Louisville. The magazine is interesting; it's an entertainment-geared production for the 18-25 market in Louisville. Should I ever have anything of interest to write, I may submit something.