sunrays and saturdays

I went to Minnesooooota this weekend....and saw a tornado! Wheee! It's odd how I've grown up right in the heart of tornado alley, and I have to go Minnesota to see a tornado. Go figure. Actually, I've seen one in Kansas, too, but that still means that 50% of all the tornadoes I've ever seen have been in Minnesota.

Anywho, the reason I went up there was to meet Jeremy's family and let him show me around his stomping grounds. He took me to the Mall of America in Minneapolis (although I had no money to spend...curses!) and also took me mini-golfing under blacklight (how cool was that!). Apparently, my eyes glow under the blacklight and make me look like some kind of hell demon. I wish I could have seen them myself, but there were no mirrors around. It's beautiful country up there, and it's such a shame that it's so damn frigid in the winter, because it could almost be somewhere I would like to live someday.

Now I'm back in Ames and back at work. I pick my sister up at the Des Moines airport tomorrow, and she's staying with me for the summer before school starts up again next fall back east. Fun times, fun times. I think she's really looking forward to coming down, too. I get to see my sissy!!!! YAY!!!!

Bleh. I'm a little bit wet, a little bit cold, and a little bit sickly. Pre-sick aches and pains go nicely with cold rain and wind. I think I'll be cuddling up in my warm, electric blanket with a cup of hot tea when I get home. My oh my that sounds splendid. Getting home is the trick, though. I'm at Agronomy now for work, and I live south of the Boheme. That's over a mile in walking distance. Mayhap I'll just hop on the bus and spare myself the agony of my aching joints being exposed to the elements. I'm such a whiner when I'm sick. :p

Well, that's certainly interesting. What would cause the PHP code to fail on every single file in a directory...and quite possibly the whole server? This site that I maintain for my adviser uses PHP to link every page to a stylesheet and header, but the pages can't find those things, so the whole layout on at least 30 or 40 of them is totally fucked. I'm not EVEN going to start pasting the style code into every one of those pages. Not at 12:30 am on a day when I have two finals. No way in hell. There has to be an easier solution. Something probably just got tweaked with the server to where it doesn't recognize PHP. I emailed the resident techie guru of our department. He knows everything there is to know about computers, servers, and programming languages.

That said, I'm going to bed.

Now that I have a right-clicking mouse on my computer at work, I've been playing around with Gimp. I don't know yet what it can do with images, but I do know this: Gimp sucks ASS at anything that involves text. It has that annoying Hyperstudio quality about it where if you click out of the text at any point, it's stuck there on the page right where you left it. There's also very few fonts to choose from, you have pretty much no ability to make a statement carry over to more than one line unless you use an additional plug-in, it's clumsier than hell when it comes to adding drop shadows and bevels, and new text boxes don't automatically create new layers. All in all, I ended up using Powerpoint of all things to create what I needed to create, because Gimp just wasn't doing it for me. God I miss having Photoshop. I guess I still kind of do have it, but I always run the risk of freezing up the old clunker of a computer before I get a chance to save my work. Technology hates me.

Boss=Asshole. Allow me to explain.

Tomorrow is my last day at this job EVER. My boss today got all excited about something I did, and declared, "Starting tomorrow, I will give you raise!"

*snort*

I just got off my last night shift EVER. I'm never ever doing that again. So, now I'm on a mission to get my sleeping pattern back to something resembling normal. I woke up at 3 pm yesterday, so I figure I might be able to make it to 10 pm tonight without sleeping. I know that seems like a pretty crazy way to fix my internal clock, but it's not like I'm actually doing anything important today. Wish me luck.

I'm finally settled in here at home. It's going to be a long summer.

I went in to find out what my schedule was going to be for the summer at the hotel, and they told me that I basically didn't have one. The two people doing front desk now don't want to cut hours, so that leaves me out in the cold. My boss told me that I could work the night shift three nights a week, but that is a) not enough hours, and b) the worst shift to do. No..fucking..thanks. I only make $5.15 an hour, so I could actually do a lot better. We'll see what I can find.

Anyways, just wanted to let you all know that I'm back.

I think I have a new job!! My advisor is looking for someone to help with his webpage and do research. I am SO happy to be done with this shitfuck job that I have right now. Besides, it's in my major! YAY!!!