The last couple of days have seen me playing around in HTML and with Frontpage a hell of a lot! My cool little idea of transfering my site from Angelfire to a domain of its own will take a lot of hard work and programming if I want to make things actually work properly. I think that I've just about fixed up the links and sorted out all the pages so that my entire site is now sitting on Nats' computer ready to be uploaded to a non-existent domain name. Luckily I've had some practice, and a little chance to experiment through my Mum's Website, which has taught me a lot in how ftp and domain names really work. Although it will be a mission uploading everything, I can see how it would all work now and things would be so great not to have to put up with Angelfire's banner ads, as well as their pop-ups which annoy the hell out of me.

At the moment we're trying to sort out my shifts so that I can have a three day weekend and go away to Mangawhai Heads for the first time since the start of August. At the moment I have Thursday, Saturday and Monday off, which is completely and utterly annoying. So I'm going to try to pick up a shift tomorrow (Thursday) so that I can have Sunday off and we'll be able to go away for a whole three days!

I've thought about finally abandoning Angelfire and setting up my own domain name, meaning that I'll actually have a proper website and not rely upon the sometimes volatile Angelfire who seem to decide once in a while that they want to either suspend my site for using up too much bandwidth, or totally disable my site for absolutely nothing whatsoever. But I haven't really decided upon it, for a start it is going to be an absolute mission to sort out all my links so that they aren't pointing towards angelfire pages, and to also sort out the money for a website which I don't really have at the moment. So it's possible that in the near future that this site will be switched to something like www.agglomeratedinsanity.net.

Work was really really quiet today, being a Labour Day public holiday. But I guess on the plus side it meant that it was a pretty relaxing shift, and I get double pay because of the public holiday.

We attempted to tidy the room today, which sort of got halfway there before I had to go to work, and then we ended up just having masses of clothes and other random stuff on the bed where we needed to sleep. I got a whole heap of cardboard boxes from work to put some of our 'stuff' in, which will be good as there's so much 'stuff' in this room which just needs to go somewhere else so that we don't just end up moving everything around each time we try to tidy up the room and end up making a bigger mess than what we started with. The whole idea is to get as much out of this room as possible, hopefully everything that we don't need until we move out can go into the boxes and end up either under the house or in my old bedroom at my parents' place.

Having actual two day weekends is definitely a great way to actually feel as though you're having a proper break. We spent yesterday pretty much relaxing, eventually getting up to have a look at a few baby shops in Albany which became rather depressing as we realised how damn expensive everything is. But then after we got home things were a little better as we had a night of movies, thrashing the good old teen movie genre - always good to have some light comic relief after a long week of work.

We've been thinking about the logistics of moving out of our current residence at Natalie's grandmother's and into our own place a couple of months before the baby is born in March or April next year. There's literally so much packed into our bedroom at the moment that I get the feeling even though we're going to be moving into a larger place, with one or two bedrooms, we're actually going to realise that the stuff we have at the moment is going to fill the house quite adequately. Fortunately we'll be able to have my old single bed and chest of drawers from my parents' house which will be very good for the extra storage place - but I really want to avoid the current situation of have so much 'stuff' with no real place to store it all that we end up with every single imaginable surface in the room covered with millions of little things. It's quite incredible the stuff that you just accumulate....

Yay I have the weekend off! For the first time in many months I'm not working on Sunday, and actually have a whole weekend off which is very exciting! Then on Monday it's a public holiday, which although I got sucked into working on, still means that I'll get paid double time for the hours that I do, which should make up for the fact that I'm 'only' doing 5 shifts this week instead of my normal 6. I get the feeling that I really do need a break from work, as it's been driving me a little crazy in the past while. This is mainly the result of what's happened in my previous post (which I won't further elaborate on, let's just say things haven't got any better), which is really starting to annoy me more than ever and I sometimes feel that I'm really beginning to lose my patience.

Work has been fairly quiet recently, as university heads towards its final weeks and the whole city begins to shift into summer mode. Lots of people are now looking ahead to the Santa Parade at the end up November, which is always the busiest day of the year and quite an insane day to work as I found out last year. It's pretty cool in many ways, as basically the whole store works at least at some stage on the Sunday, everyone gets special T shirts to wear and the fact that you're about 20 times busier than normal makes the day pass exceptionally quickly. I had always looked forward to working during Santa Parade at Queen St even before I worked there, as people had talked about how absolutely insanely busy it gets.

It's very scary how we're almost all the way through October now. 2003 has seemed to have passed awfully quickly, and new years really doesn't seem that long ago (although I generally find myself saying this each and every year). But on the other hand, new years from two years ago does seem a hell of a long time ago - which just goes to show that life probably isn't really passing by that quickly, just the year you are in seems to fly by but when you look back at the previous year it seems to have taken a hell of a long time. For example, towards the end of 2002 it seemed as though that year had absolutely flown by, whereas now it seems as though 2003 has flown by, but that most of 2002 seems a really, really long time ago (such as being at university). I guess there's no real formula for figuring out how your brain works at how you view the past - just that as each year of your life passes it's a smaller percentage of your total life so it probably does pass a little quicker than ever before.

I went up to university yesterday to try and get started on my enrolment for next year. It's quite exciting to be able to look beyond my life at McDonald's and to see better things happening. Unfortunately the handbooks for next year haven't quite come out yet for geography, so I'm still in that 'waiting' phase of my life. It will be great to sort out exactly what papers I'm going to do, figure out when I'll be at university and actually start to get some idea about what my life is going to be like next year.

As you may have noticed from my above post, work is rather annoying me at the moment. Well to be honest it's not really work that is driving me nuts, it's my restaurant manager Naz, who in my opinion doesn't really have a clue about the best way to run a store. She seems to think that the best way to get stuff done is to yell and scream, rather than actually working with us to improve the place. I mean sure she has bosses who need to be impressed and results that need to be achieved, but her whole attitude seems to be one of little respect for others and a lot of hypocrisy. She tells us that we need to work as a team and to stop setting each other up, but then starts joking about how a manager who isn't there is useless etc. etc. She also seems all friendly and caring one minute, to then change tack entirely and tell everyone how badly someone messed up or that they need to get their act together. I think that I've been pretty fair, every new store manager takes a while to get used to a store and I remember thinking how the place was going to shit when Richard first started as store manager back in February this year. But it has been a month and a half now, and I've given Naz chance after chance to show whether I can respect her as a good restaurant manager, and I'm afraid that simply can't be the case. It's possible that the restaurant might improve as a result of this 'hard-line' attitude, but I think that a more likely result is going to be a complete breakdown of trust between managers and the morale of everyone working at the store becoming lower and lower. Surely if we want to improve the morale among not only the managers, but also the whole team it can't be helped by yelling and screaming. Funnily enough everyone who I've talked to at the Grey Lynn store where Richard went thinks that he's a great restaurant manager, and they keep asking "how's Naz?" with a huge smile on their face saying "ha! ha!"

Happy Birthday Ella! Although we had the 'party' yesterday, Ella officially turns 18 today. It was nice seeing everyone yesterday, my Nana made a delicious lunch including the most wonderful carrot soup and homemade cheesecake. Ella had made herself some weird veagan potato cakes which I described as fossilised footprints (they tasted a little bland), but all in all it was a pretty good afternoon. I got to catch up with my cousin Susie a little, and Nats realised that she knew a lot of people Susie knows through school as they went to the same school, although came and went at fairly similar times so never really bumped into each other too many times.

Then last night Nats had a babysitting job which didn't finish till about 4am while I spent the whole night watching rugby on TV which was a fairly relaxing way to spend one's evening. There were a few surprises in the games I saw although the results ended up being quite predictable.

Then today it was back to work, and the start of another six day week. That's the funny thing about working Monday to Friday and then Sunday, that although you're used to Sunday being the end of the week and Monday the beginning it almost switches with Sunday being the start of the long week of work. Today went pretty well though, as being shift manager is generally a more pleasant way to spend the day as you are the one who determines what's going on and you can run the place your way for once. Nats went to the parent and child show and brought home about 2 million little pamphlets and information packages - so I've got enough reading about things such as 'whether or not to vaccinate' or 'hints and tips for fathers' to last me a lifetime. It's really quite useful and exactly what I need, so that I don't head into this all without having at least some idea of what I'm doing. They say that the child turns a person into a parent, but I want to learn a few of the tricks beforehand if possible.

It's funny how the store that I work at has seemed to change an awful lot over the last year and a half. Queen St. McDonald's is right in the middle of Auckland City, you basically can't get any more 'central' than our store. It was the second McDonald's to open in New Zealand, way back in like 1977 and had been a bank for about a hundred years before then. Being basically the only fast food restaurant in the city until the 1990s (I think), Queen St. McDonald's was the busiest store in New Zealand - especially famous for its lunch rushes, Santa Parade and New Year's. However, over the past few years and especially in the last year it has become fairly obvious that people are getting a little bit sick of McDonald's. IN the city now there are 4 Burgers Kings, a Wendys, at least three Subways, and a crap load of Kebab stores, Chinese food outlets, Sushi bars etc. etc. From my perspective this has hit our store pretty hard, and the 'rushed off your feet' lunches have just about been put away into my old memory banks (except for school holdiays). It's a little bit sad in some ways, as when I was working at other McDonald's I always heard stories about how busy the Queen St. store was and I always wanted to work there. I suppose that sense of 'mystery' is always going to disappear when you work at a place fulltime for over a year, but I do miss how the store was last year, and things are a bit more difficult now as the reduced sales means that you're left with fewer staff to help get things done which makes everyone's job more difficult. It's still kind of cool when people from other McDonald's ask you what store you're from, or people who you know ask where you work and you can always say "Queen St, the big one in the city" and everyone knows exactly what you're talking about, but I think that the best days for our store are behind us and no matter how many store managers they try the place is never going to be what it was.

Friday is generally the end of a very long week for me, as Saturday is usually my only day off. Therefore, I suppose by Friday I can be forgiven for being a little bit tetchy with stupid customers who can't read, can't tell the difference between a burger and a combo, and keep on dropping their bloody drinks on the floor. Although it can become rather amusing when you've seen it 20 million times. They come back to the front counter looking incredibly sheepish... "um.... I dropped my drink", and if I'm feeling in a good mood my response is usually "that's OK, I'll get you another one and get someone to mop up the mess." But sometimes it's just so tempting to half-pretend you don't have a clue what they're saying until they basically have to show you the big mess they've left somewhere on our pristine white floor tiles. We've got these really big cups at the moment for a promotional product and believe me when a dumbass customer drops one it spills a lot of liquid on the floor, I witnessed about three of them today, plus a customer who spilled their coffee all over our condiment bar, another customer who spilled someone else's meal all over the floor because they were trying to grab their own feed while not quite being careful enough. I really couldn't quite help myself from laughing when that happened.

It's my 'little' sister's 18th birthday on Sunday, which is the kind of official transition from childhood to adulthood. It's kind of weird and scary for me, as I've known her from the moment she was born, and remember helping teach her to read, write etc. and all of a sudden she's grown up and 18. While the moment you turn 18 has some important legal implications (most obviously being able to buy alcohol and being able to vote), in my experience you obviously don't turn into an adult overnight. For me, between about 19 and 21 were the big two years of my life changing lots - when I was 19 I would probably say that I was still a child in many ways, but two years later and I've grown up a shit load. I know that Ella generally grew up a bit earlier than I did, as a combination of her personality, the fact that girls tend to do that earlier than guys, and that she was always trying to compete with me. But it will be nice to see everyone tomorrow, including my Nana who I haven't seen for a few months, and my cousin who I've only briefly seen once in about the last four years.

Nats is looking at all sorts of labour and birth options at the moment, realising the absolut myriad of options actually avaliable out there. I'm probably one of the most uneducated people in the world when it comes to this, only really figuring that your waters break, you go to hospital, then a few hours later baby is born. But it's really not even close to being that simple when you consider all the options: is home-birth an option? What drugs if any are going to be taken? Who cuts the cord? Who's going to be there? What positions are going to be most confortable? The list of questions goes on and on... luckily the internet has proven to be a treasure-trove of information and I reckon by March next year Nats will probably be telling the midwife exactly what to do!

Work was really screwed up yesterday, as the EFTPOS at my store broke down for ages and ages, and we eventually had to close the system a couple of times to unsuccessfully try to fix the problem. This was a real pain in the ass, as it meant that we had to take all the orders with pen and paper which totally stuffed up the cash as some orders weren't recorded properly etc. etc. But we sorted it all out in the end, although explaining to some customers that no matter which bank card they use it won't work, and no matter which machine they try it on, it still won't work.

I felt incredibly tired when I woke up this morning, maybe it was because last night was really cold and I often have trouble sleeping when it's cold as my I think that I'm constantly trying to keep myself warm in a semi-conscious state which I don't really remember, but obviously stops me from sleeping properly. I'm also not really eating properly yet, as anything I do eat seems to send my stomach into turmoil as though it really doesn't know what the hell to do with it.

I've been feeling rather ill over the past couple of days. Maybe it's something I caught from Nats, or something which I ended up passing to her, but we've both felt pretty crap lately. I was feeling feverish on Saturday night and then had a really broken night's sleep before waking up on Sunday morning and basically running to the toilet to throw up. However, as I hadn't eaten for a while there wasn't really anything in me. Then I had work, which was a bit of a mission as I felt rather nauseous and then very very weak and tired. Luckily it was a reasonably quiet Sunday and I was the shift manager which meant that I could take a little sit down whenever I needed it. I felt a little bit better last night, and had a better sleep although once I woke up this morning and went to work I still didn't feel like eating and felt like I had really really bad indigestion. Then the air-conditioning at work wasn't really working particularly well and the heat made me feel really really tired. So hopefully I'm going to feel better by tomorrow so that I can actually eat properly and regain my strength.

I had a really strange dream last night, that was really reall vivid for some reason. In it I was back at university, for some reason completing my Bachelors (which I did last year) and I was studying Geography, English and Biology (which were the subjects Nats was studying at uni earlier this year). I remember getting stressed out about not finding my class for biology, and when I eventually did find the place it was located in the room back at my high school where I did 4th form Social Studies and 6th form Geography. It was the first class of semester, which always means that they hand out heaps and heaps of booklets and so on, so I was chatting to the person sitting next to me (who funnily enough was another manager from work) about how I was going to fit university around work and that I would need to call Head Office to tell them that I couldn't make it on Wednesday. But the odd thing was halfway through all of this my subconscious seemed to realise that something just wasn't quite right here, and I basically stood up in the class and announced that there was no reason for me to be here as I had actually completed my degree already and that all I needed to study was postgraduate geography. I guess this mixture of knowing what was going on combined with the normal believing that the dream is reality was too much for me and I woke up. I haven't had any dreams that vivid for a couple of weeks so maybe it was a sign that I'm starting to sleep a little bit better which makes it possible for my dreams to develop a little bit more. Moreover, the dream has got me thinking about university a bit more and I'm starting to realise that March next year really isn't that far away in some ways and that McDonald's isn't going to be my life for too much longer. I think that's a good thing as I realise that basically what I want to do with my job is to have a fun time while earning the money that I need. So I don't need to take everything too seriously as I'm not going to be there forever. Maybe that's why I had a good day at work today - I realised that it's important for me to be having a good time as basically I'm going to look back at this year in a few years time and see it as something which was a bit different so I may as well be having fun during this stage of my life.

Cricket world records went tumbling today as Matthew Hayden surpassed Brian Lara's 375 to score the highest ever total in test cricket. It's always exciting when records are broken, although in this case the team that Hayden scored his total against (a very weak Zimbabwe) are hardly the England side that Brian Lara tore apart almost ten years ago. But my Dad was watching the innings on TV and he said that it was some of the most incredible cricket that he's ever seen, so I guess there shouldn't really be any 'buts' when it comes to the outstanding achievement of Matthew Hayden.

It's odd how my page is developing at the moment. There seems to be both a lot going on in my life at the moment yet at the same time each day seems very similar to the last: get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep, repeat. Meanwhile I can't really seem to get the essence of what's going on in my life into this page, which is supposed to be some sort of living memory for me of my life at that particular stage. For some reason I'm incredibly scared about forgetting huge chunks of my life; I wish that I could remember more about the last half of 2001 for example, as it was a time in my life of huge change which had a massive impact upon where I am today. Yet I only really seem to recall little bits: being at university, staying the night at Nats' place or studying for my exams while there are huge gaps in my memory which can never really be filled as I never really wrote about it all in my page. I've always been a bit fearful about writing too much about certain aspects of my life because I felt it was unfair upon those involved, which I know for sure led to my webiste only really reflecting a very narrow aspect of my life at certain times. I guess I still feel the same in some ways, that because this is a public page that anyone can really come across by typing my name into google, I need to show some discretion in what I write. However, at the same time I'm losing huge chunks of my life which are important yet not really appropriate to be writing down. I think that I have opened up over the past couple of years and I write more about my feelings than I used to, and maybe that's because I'm a bit more comfortable about who I am now and I'm not trying to prove myself to others quite as much.

At the moment I seem to feel apprehensive about something. It's like my life seems to be alright but I'm having to balance everything so that it doesn't fall to pieces. I keep on running stuff that needs to be done through my mind: must remember to cancel gym membership, must sort out people for Head Office next week, must remember to go to market research on Saturday, must sort my shifts out so that they stop scheduling my on Saturdays. I guess that I'm just scared that soon I'm going to just forget to do all these things, and that everything's just going to screw up. Maybe that's why I'm not sleeping very well at the moment, because I've got ten million things running through my mind continuously and I keep on having to remind myself about everything. I guess if I was clever then I would sort out some sort of system to make life easier but organising stuff just doesn't seem to appeal very much to me at the moment.

Work is finally improving a bit, as I've put behind me the problems that I had in the last couple of weeks and got back to basics. I've realised that I have obviously been doing a good job otherwise I wouldn't have got to where I am and I wouldn't have the respect that I seem to have, so I've just figured that I should do what I have been doing while also being more aware of quality standards as that probably seems to have slipped a bit in the last couple of months (working graveyard shifts probably does that to you). Meanwhile the school holidays have finished which has left the place much quieter than usual, and rather less chaotic which I suppose is a good thing. While it's true that we don't have nearly as many people working as they've all gone back to school or university, the ones left seem to know what they're doing well enough and the place has run very smoothly in the last couple of days in my opinion.

I've got my laptop back finally! After living without it for a bit over a week due to a broken power cord Dell got a replacement delivered surprisingly quickly given that it had to come from Malaysia. So fortunately Nats and I no longer have to share a computer and can both happily 'do our stuff'. It also means that Nats can probably recover some of the stuff that she lost when windows threw a spazz and formatted the wrong hard drive, although not that much was actually stored on my computer.

Nats is starting to feel our baby kicking inside her which is pretty cool. She says that it's kinda like having one of your muscles twinge, but the same thing happens again and again so you know it's definitely not just a freak occurrance. I guess that's a good thing to know that the baby's healthy and kicking (literall), now I just have to wait a while for the kicks to become strong enough for me to feel them although I think that'll take a couple of months yet.

Yay it's Friday! Unfortunately I'm working both Saturday and Sunday which kinda kills the purpose of having a weekend. But I guess that at least work generally seems a little bit more relaxed on the weekend, everyone's a little less stressed out than usual and the whole atmosphere is nicer. That will be quite a welcome change after what has been a pretty stressful week, with my meeting on Monday and the whole feeling that everyone is watching me and waiting for me to stuff up again. I even feel like I've lost a bit of confidence in myself to be a good manager, something which has spread to the other shift managers who don't seem to have quite as much faith in me as before. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but I guess that there's only one way to change that and that's to prove to myself and everyone else that I am a damn good manager.

One of my oldest friends from chat had her baby at 4:49am this morning. So congratulations Donna! It seems to me that a hell of a lot of people from chat seem to be either getting pregnant at the moment or have recently had babies. Maybe it's just something about chat, that you're one of those indoor people who ends up having sex lots and eventually getting pregnant. It's quite funny looking back at my chat days, thinking about some of the people I knew and wondering what they're up to these days - I also quite often wish that I had saved more of my chat transcripts as they provide a huge insight into a stage of my life that has almost completely been lost, although the fact that I'm with Nats is obviously in part a result of my chat days. The other day I did find a chat transcript buried deep on my computer - although unfortunately it was one of the more coring days in chat, and one where I was actually being a big pain in the ass to everyone.

A new music channel has been launched in New Zealand today, which is really cool because it's actually the only music channel that we can watch from our bedroom as the Pay TV is only hooked up to the TV in the lounge. But anyway, in 1997 TV4 was launched, but it never really took off so they've decided to turn it into a music channel around the clock which is all good as far as I'm concerned as there wasn't really ever that much we watched on TV4 (apart from Buffy and 7th Heaven), and it's always good watching music TV as you quite often get the songs before the radio does, and a long time before you see them emerge on the charts. To kick things off they're playing a list of the top 100 music videos of all time, which has brought back a lot of memeories seeing the songs that we knew when we were little. Oh the memories...

Work hasn't really got any better. I had the meeting on Monday which went OK I suppose, although I have ended up with a written warning for everything. I guess now I just have to convince the powers-to-be that I'm not a bad shift manager, and that I can do things better than most other people working at Queen St. I am determined to prove that I am a good manager.

It's unfortunate that all this work shit should happen now, just as I'm starting to fee a lot better about everything else going on in my life. It seems as though me and Nats have sorted out quite a lot of things, and I feel better about the baby. Nats is even starting to physically feel a little bit better, possibly showing that she's past the worst of her morning sickness. I guess you can never be totally happy in life, either everything goes wrong at the same time or a couple of things go wrong which stop everything else from being right.