Word of the Day: stonewall Okay, I'm a dumbass. I had an entry nearly done, and I exed out of Internet Explorer accidentally. So now I'm mad. So there's been a lot of things going on around here this past week. First off, let me start with Betty. Immediately after I put up my last entry on Monday, she started making this horrendous buzzing noise. When I got home from work, she showed a blue screen with a black boarder. I pointed to it and asked JD, 'This is bad, yeah?' 'Yeah,' he said. He tried to restart her and she said she couldn't detect either the operating system or the hardrive. Whichever way, she's in a better place. We've been a lot of places together and typed a lot [and a lot and a lot] It's interesting timing the computer gods have, actually. I got Betty the first semester I was at UD, and she died the day after graduation. It was quite fitting. Speaking of dying, apparently JD's mother is dying. She's got perephrial artery disease in her legs and arms and the arteries in her neck are badly blocked. There've been tests and she's seen people, but she's going to Houston next week and probably taking more tests and seeing more people. Her family doctor suggested she make her peace with God and draw up a will. We sort of don't know how bad it is because she's a bit of a hypocondriac, but neither of us doubt her ailment. There's this gene in their family that predisposes them for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. JD's uncle Dale is a health freak, a vegitarian who runs and/or bikes everyday, and he has to take pills for high cholesterol. I think JD's taking all this sort of hard. I've never had this happen to me, someone so close to me die, so I'm trying to be consoling and caring, but I don't know how well I'm doing. It's just not fair for JD because it wasn't long ago that he was going through this with his dad. I can't even imagine what's going on in his head concerning this, but he tries to tell me. There is some sweet to counteract the bitter, however. On Monday JD got a job. He's making cabinets for Victoria Cabinet Works [which is apparently a big deal in cabinet-making down here] for $8 an hour. He's also working a lot of superfabulous overtime at $12 an hour. He gets paid every week, so that's nice. He's working from seven in the morning to around eight in the evening, so the days are long and the work is sometimes very physical, but I think he's glad to be working again. Since we both have to be at work at seven, we're swiching off weeks taking Patrick to Laura's. I volunteered this first week to let JD have time to get used to the work and getting up and all that. He thanked me and I appreciated that he acknowledged my effort at being kind. Once again, everything at work has been turned upside-down. It all started on Thursday. I had been at work about five minutes when I saw Cong Tran walking out the restaurant [if you don't remember, Cong is awesome]. I asked him why he was back and he said Mr. Hsu wanted him to take care of some things for him. I wondered what these things were until the next day. Again, it was just after seven, and Cong came up to the desk and said something. With him being Vietnamese and it being seven o'clock in the morning, I was all like, 'What?' So he said again, 'I think I'm going to fire Sherryl today.' I laughed a little and said okay, and that was that. I knew it, I knew he was going to come back and help us with all this remodeling crap we're going through. So after it happened, I saw Sherryl walk out into the lobby in a huff with her purse and keys. She came back a little later with her truck and got all her things from her office and split. There was no goodbye, she didn't even look at me. I think she knew that nearly everyone dispised her as a general manager. I told a few employees after the whole ordeal was over and they seemed shocked, but they didn't know Cong. I wanted to ask Simon what he thought about everything, but he was busy with Mark [who's turning out to be increasingly incompetent]. At any rate, he didn't seem too surprised or bothered about it, so either he knew already or it just didn't matter to him. I told a few of the UP guys about it, and they were as glad as I was to hear that Cong was back and Sherryl was gone. I'm not saying that now that Cong's here everything will be peachy keen because our hotel still sucks and needs tons of remodeling and other stuff, but work will be much more enjoyable and not as stiff-feeling because Cong always brings a sort of relaxed, laid back atmosphere wherever he goes. I guess that's the New Orleans coming out. There was something else on my list that I had to write about, but the list was at the top of the entry I exed out of, so I don't remember. So I'll talk about other stuff. I've decided I'm going to do NaNoWriMo this year. I don't care what's going on, I have to do it this year. I found out about this three years ago and have been saying, 'Oh, I want to do it this year,' since then, but I am going to do it this year. I'm not saying I'm going to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, but I'm going to try my hardest. I bought Chris' book, and after I read it I was all inspired and excited and ready. Of course, it's in November, but it's never too early to start getting in the right frame of mind, eh? I'm really excited about it, though. Even if what comes out of it is crap, there has to be at least one good or decent idea in the whole of it. Okay, after all that I still don't remember what else there was on my list. So I'm done. This has taken me about seven hours to write [twice] between cleaning the house and playing with Patrick and meeting JD for lunch. For the first day in a while, I was highly productive. *later* Holy crap, I was reading my earlier entries. From 8 January 2006-- 'So Cong's left. I'm so dreading work tomorrow. This lady from Channelview, Sheryl or something, is our new GM and she seems like a bad one. And by bad one I mean she doesn't seem like she cares about the employees and she's definitely not friendly, I know that for sure. Needless to say, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be complaining about this Sheryl lady often.' I totally called it. I asked Cong the reason he decided to fire her, and he said that in one day he saw how badly she treated her employees, and that was that for him. I am so good, I just wanted to mention that.