Yes I am alive! It's been a really long time since I updated, which has partly been my fault but also partly out of my hands as the power supply cord for my laptop decided to die on me which means that I can't use my computer at all. At the same time windows accidentally formatted the wrong hard drive of Nats' computer, which meant she lost just about everything and it has taken forever to get the computer back in business (as in it's only working now). Lots has happened since the 16th, and I will try to fill everyone in about what I've been up to over the past 12 days.

Last week was pretty boring, work annoyed me for a while as they were going to screw up the schedules to lower our labour percentage for the month but sanity prevailed and we actually got the extra people that are always needed for school holidays. Then on Monday this week we had a crew rally thingee for everyone who worked at McDonald's in the whole of Auckland (which is a lot of people), which was a bit of a waste of time although they gave us all pretty nifty Nokia 2280 cellphones for the trouble of going. Then this whole last week has been pretty busy at work with school holidays and all, it seems like everyone wants to go to McDonald's for lunch - although we have had enough people for most of the time which is always good.

Then on Friday afternoon the word went out that a couple of big bosses from the U.S. were coming into our store as a part of their visit to New Zealand. I must say that I didn't really think that much of it, we get Head Office people coming through our store all the time, I even recognise them half the time from my days spent at Head Office. But about four hours later all the senior managers had gone home as it seemed that these Americans weren't actually coming at all, leaving me by myself with a bunch of crew who weren't really that well trained but would do. Then at about five o'clock I recognised one of the people from Head Office and realised that they were actually coming. And at a pretty bad time as we had quite a lot of food which was getting a little bit too old and should have been thrown away (quite common at every McDonald's I've ever worked at or even been to). Moreover these people just happened to be absolute experts at food quality and figured out that the nuggets were getting a bit old etc. etc. Basically the whole thing was turning into a bit of a disaster, big bosses were called and the whole thing seemed to come back and fall upon me, even though I had been pretty badly set up. My bosses then got in shit for not being there (fair enough in many ways), and I've got a meeting tomorrow to see what's going to happen to me. Luckily I have had quite a lot of time to think about it all, and at the moment I'm just tossing up between the "it happens all the time, on every single shift at McDonald's so you're only picking on me coz I got caught" approach or the "I was completely set up, had badly trained crew, wasn't even meant to be running shift, and WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU" approach, or most probably a combination of the two. Prior to the visit I actually thought that I was doing a pretty good job running shift, in that I had no experienced grill people scheduled whatsoever, and hadn't really seen any commitment from the restaurant manager when it came to enforcing quality control standards. But the good thing is that I can have Nats go with me tomorrow, which makes it seem a lot easier as I know that she won't let them give me shit, for a situation where I was actually doing an OK job considering the 'support' I had.

On a positive note we went out to dinner tonight for Nats' grandmother's birthday which was nice. The only bad thing about going to nice restaurants is that the meals are so damn huge you can never really enjoy the delicious desserts they have on offer because you're so full from your mains. But it was a nice change after a relatively stressful day at work.

I had one of those really, really bad days at work today. The kind that make you want to quit your job and work somewhere else. For a start we were a couple of people short throughout the entire day, and then I found out that four of my five shifts for next week are outside my available hours and that they've screwed up the whole schedules so that there aren't nearly going to be enough people working next week. I guess it's a good thing that I have a day at Head Office tomorrow just to get away from the place for another day and hope that everything is sorted by Thursday, even though I'm pretty sure that it won't be... then I'll have to sort out someone to swap all my shifts with next week and even then it's going to be a mission... arrrggghhhh...

At some stage in the next week or two I should head up to the university a start to get a few things sorted for next year. It's quite possible the the geography handbooks for 2004 will be out so that I'll be able to find out exactly which courses are avaliable next year so that I can start to sort out which ones I am going to do. Even better, they might have even sorted out the timetables so that I'll have some idea about what my life is going to be like next year. It's also quite exciting to be doing something other than work at McD's as it gives me hope that there is something better out there for me than what's currently going on.

It's been a few days since I last updated, mainly because a few days ago I was a little bored so had a bit of a dig through all the PC games Nats and I own, and found a copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon. Although it's a pretty old game, and doesn't work particularly well on either of our computers it's incredibly addictive and I've spent most of my computer time over the past three days playing it. I guess whenever I've gone to a theme park I've always been curious about the design of the rides and wondered about designing some myself, and here's my chance. I just wish that the saved games would load so that I don't have to lose my games everytime I need to get off the computer - but I would probably have to play the game on Windows 98 for it to work.

We went to the radiologist's today to get Nats' ultrasound. It was really cool, actually seeing our baby for the first time. At first I couldn't really see anything among the different shades of grey, but eventually after much moving around we got a couple of good looks at it. The radiologist needed to measure some part of the spine to give a risk assessment for down syndrome (which was something like 1 in 6500), and the way that the baby was lying made that almost impossible to see, so Nats had to stand up and jiggle herself around a little. Eventually we got some pretty good shots, and took a video of the whole thing. Nats has scanned in a couple of the ultrasound scans which you can see here.

September 11th. I guess that day will always stand out in everyone's memories because of what happened two years ago today, two years.... wow it really doesn't seem that long ago in many ways. I think that one of the reasons the date will stand out for so long is that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and always referred to as the "September 11th attacks". I remember this time last year all the blogs that I was reading narrowed their focus from the usual wide range of topics down to everyone talking about the same thing. It was quite uncanny actually, and was only really repeated earlier this year around the time the US went to war with Iraq. I read an editorial in a newspaper today stating that in the past year more has really gone wrong for the US than did in the first year after September 11th 2001: with the Bali bombings and then losing the respect of much of the world over the war in Iraq which is drrrrrrrrrrrrragging on for them (unsurprisingly). Who knows what the state of the world will be next September 11th?

I spent another day at the Head Office today, developing some new Quarter Pounder products which look quite interesting. It was quite silly though, we were only trialling three different burgers, of which five of each were made. So in total I probably spent about 10 minutes maximum making the burgers, but at least half an hour setting everything up and then over an hour closing the kitchen down and cleaning up the mess that was made. It always seems so highly inefficient, although I guess that the whole McDonald's system is designed to make lots and lots of burgers in an efficient way rather than just 15 burgers. It meant that I had a long day though, as after I had finished at Head Office I went down to my store and worked a full shift there - plus it was a very busy day as for some reason there are a hell of a lot of people in the city this week. It's not school holidays and is the university holidays so theoretically there shouldn't be too many people in the city. But I think that maybe the university is having a lot of open days at the moment trying to enroll as many people as possible for next year so a lot of schools are having trips into the city to show their students what's in store for them in the future.

Every Wednesday I have a change of scenery from my usual Queen St. store, instead working a day at McDonald's Head Office, serving the people who work there lunch. Basically it's a fairly cruisy day in the way that you only really need to be cooking for an hour, and you spend the other time preparing and cleaning up. However, there is a lot of preparation and cleaning up to do, and always the stress of having 'big' Head Office people all around you with their critical eyes analysing everything that you do which can be a bit stressful compared to the restaurant where if you stuff up it's like "oh well.... big shit... let's just start again". But one of the fun parts of working there is that I meet up with people who work at different restaurants and hear how their stores are, and inevitably end up hearing their tales of life at McDonald's. Everyone has their stories, and I certainly have a few, but it seems that every time I work at Head Office I end up almost crying with laughter at some of the stories people have to tell. Normally based upon exactly how stupid customers can be ("how much are your $4.95 combos?), or stories of shifts gone bad... one of the fun things about working is all the stories people have to share, and realising that you know someone who used to work there, and another person who used to work with you about three years ago has popped up working at a store across the city.

I'm still stressing a bit about our finances for next year, although now that we've started doing a little bit of actualy maths it seems a bit more possible than I originally thought. Both Nats' and my gym membership ends in the next couple of months which will free up a total of over $200 a month which is being basically wasted at the moment; my pay rate should be going up soon as well, which will give me an extra $30-$40 a week which will be a big help. We're also more than likely going to live with Nats' friend Jeremy which means that we'll be able to split the costs among another person which will make a difference. So maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel which isn't just an oncoming train and maybe it is possible. Although financially moving out is going to be tough, in other ways it is exciting: not having to worry about being on the internet and clogging the phone-line, being able to play music a bit louder than we can at the moment, and just having that extra freedom. It's strange to be looking forward to, and dreading, the same thing in different ways - although I guess that can be the case for a lot of things in life, they've got plusses and minuses and you just have to live with the minuses if you want the plusses.

On Saturday I'm picking up some photos that were taken of me and Nats a couple of weeks back. We've never had professionally done photos together before, and hopefully they come out looking pretty good. Maybe it's a chance for me to update my photos page which has been rather neglected, I'll just have to dig up my scanner from somewhere in this 'room' of ours.

Work is highly chaotic at the moment, with Richard leaving and the new restaurant manager Naz coming in, it seems as though the whole place is changing with all the senior managers swapping responsibilities and a whole heap of new systems. I guess at least things are getting done, although Naz seems to extend the border between being tought and trying to make a change and being just downright bitchy. Maybe she is just trying to show up all who's boss and to break any bad habits people had (and believe me there are plenty to break), and this 'tough' attitude will pass, and I also think that she's trying to impress her boss who is basically acting as a second restaurant manager at the moment to help with all the changes.

It's funny how my page has progressed over the past two and a half years: where I used to talk about university all the time and now I find myself talking about work all the time. I guess that is probably a fairly logical conclusion as they are the activities which seem to dominate my life. I just wonder what this page will bring in the next year - back to university, having a child, moving out to our own place and all the other stuff which is going to happen is incredibly daunting at the moment - but will probably prove to be very entertaining reading for everyone. The thing that seems to worry me the most at the moment is the most mundane and boring aspect of it all, but in other ways and incredibly critical part, how we're going to cope financially. I guess that people have realised through reading my page, that this year my finances haven't exactly been comfortable: with car repayments, board and gym memebership I haven't managed to have much left over at the end of the week even though I've been working full-time. I look forward to next year and going back to university, where I will only be able to work part-time, and even though I'm going to be eligible for a student allowance with the increased rent costs let alone the fact that I'm going to be a father I just can't see how I'm going to cope. We can always say that 'we'll get by' but I just don't see how it's going to be possible....

Quite possibly my bodyclock has finally worked itself out, I didn't manage to stay awake for all of yesterday: instead I went to sleep and didn't really wake up until 8pm which wasn't really in the plan. So now I felt really wide awake having just woken up for the day and it was already night time and my plan to sort my sleep out had gone to hell. So I stayed on the net for a few hours, did a little bit of stuff that I needed to (such as updating windows and sorting out Norton Antivirus which got killed, you guessed it, by a virus). Eventually at about 4am I felt kinda tired, and went to bed to wake up at 10am, happy that my sleeping patterns were returning to something resembling normal. And so ended a rather odd week in my life, sleeping during the day and working during the night - even though the graveyard shift isn't a particularly bad one in terms of what needs to be done the fact that your sleeping patterns get totally screwed and that you're completely off kilter with most of the rest of the world around you kinda sucks. So I don't really want to do too many graveyard shifts in the future, possibly one or two on a Friday or Saturday night for a change but I'll try to avoid doing a whole week of them in the future.

Nats is still feeling sick, this whole pregnancy thing is starting to really annoy her as she's feeling nauseous, headachey and just generally sick. Rather sucks as we aren't going out anywhere, she can't really eat anything (as it all makes her sick), and we're basically incapacitated for a while. Oh well, on the bright side I guess we're not spending too much money at the moment which might give my finances the chance to recover slightly as they're in the usual critical stage with too many bills and not enough money to pay them all (even though I'm working fulltime).

I've finally finished my week of graveyard shifts, which turned out to be a bit of a mission that I only really managed to completely sort out at my last attempt: Thursday night. On Tuesday night we were pretty quiet, and my stock count was quite a lot better than it was from before, although nobody had entered the delivery for the day before (maybe I was meant to do that?) Then on Wednesday we were really busy just about the whole night, and we didn't really have much of a chance to do any cleaning, it was just non-stop which is a bit odd as it was a Wednesday night. It's strange to see what kind of people come into McDonald's at 3am in the morning, most of them seem to be rather drunk or all night workers around the city. But everyone seems to order lots and lots of burgers so even though there aren't really that many customers coming in, our sales are still pretty good and we're still kept rather busy.

My sleep patterns have been totally screwed up this week, although I actually feel pretty good today, even after my shift last night. On Tuesday and Wednesday I didn't really get enough sleep once I got home which meant that I was always quite tired, but yesterday I slept basically the whole day which meant that even now I don't feel too bad. Maybe it's a good idea if I try to stay awake today so that I can go to sleep tonight and get my sleeping patterns back to normal. But I am not actually sure that I'll be able to stay awake for that long considering I woke up at 5pm last night.

In other news, Angelfire still seems to be screwing my site up. Whenever I go into the page from outside of my editing facility I can never see any later than my entry on Augest 31st even though I have made two entries since then. Maybe it's just me who's getting screwed over and other people might be able to see my latest entires - who knows...

It's been an odd last couple of days, as my week of graveyard shifts has kicked in. I woke up on Monday morning at about 10am, then had a pretty relaxing day I must say - which included a trip to North Shore hospital to meet Natalie's midwife and to collect a whole heap more pamplets on everything that could possibly be related to having a baby. I guess it was a useful trip as we found out we can go and get an ultrasound in the next couple of weeks which will be the first chance to actually see our baby. Maybe that will make it really sink in for me, actually seeing it on the screen, which can only be a good thing for all of us in the long run if I can finally make myself realise that it is happening.

Last night I ran the graveyard shift from 11pm-7am which didn't go too badly I suppose. We were pretty quiet for most of the night, except for a brief patch between 1am and 2am when we got a mad rush of like 60 people walking into the restaurant at once. I slightly screwed up the stock count and system close, but I guess that's to be expected considering that I had never done either before. Eventually the system close problems were able to be fixed, and I should be able to do a better job tonight. Unfortunately when 7am rolled around I wasn't able to quite go home yet because we had a managers meeting at 10am to let us know that Richard our restaurant manager was shifting to the Grey Lynn store while we were getting the restaurant manager from Grey Lynn coming to our store. Then I went down to see Nats at her work, and she told me that if I waited around for an hour then she'd give me a lift home. So I eventually got to sleep at around 1pm, roughly 27 hours after I woke up on Monday morning which is probably some kind of record for me. Now, at about 8pm, I feel slightly refreshed although I get the feeling that I'm going to be pretty stuffed once I've finished my shift tonight. I don't think that I could do graveyard shifts all the time because I can't seem to sleep that well during the day as my body is very suited to having reasonably settled sleeping patterns.

dAs yet another month of 2003 disappears without a trace... Sure, I'm going to look back at August 2003 and realise that month did indeed change my life, but now it really seems as though the whole month has just flown by. I've worked a lot this month, I've stressed a lot this month, but I think that things are finally on the up. I guess the only real way to improve your life is to start with yourself and try to make a difference about how you're feeling, and then to spread that to the people around you which will hopefully make things improve.

I've also given my site a bit of a trim tonight, having Angelfire disable my site for a while probably gave me a bit of a wakeup call that I need to be a little more careful about how I approach this site to ensure that the important stuff is backed up regularly. True, I had been smart enough to download some of my archived journal entries, but the most recently downloaded one was March this year - so I would have still lost a huge chunk of my life. From now on I'm going to make it a bit of a habit to backup my site at least once a month so that if Angelfire are real assholes ever in the future I will not lose too much... and I doubt that anyone's going to miss the couple of pages that I deleted, they only averaged about 10 hits a month.

Funny to think that this time last year I was about to head down to the Hawke's Bay on my Geography fieldtrip. In some ways that feels like ages ago, but in other ways it doesn't really seem like that long ago. Funnily enough, that fieldtrip was a bit of a turning point in last year as things really began to improve in my life after I got back, a process that continued well into this year. So maybe September, and the start of spring is a time when my life looks set to improve and we can all enjoy the (slightly) warmer weather.