Tired!

I am so tired. I just got home from 13hours of work and I want to sleep. But first I must relate my silliness. I had no one to share it with at work today, so I will share it with all of you. At zehrs, during my 11th hour of work today, a customer asked me a question which I did not understand AT ALL. It turns out he was wondering where we keep our fliers, but I heard something about adding fire and I got very confursed. Anyway, a short time later this customer came through my line and I apoligized for the confusion and I proceeded to explain that I was so tired that I could not comprend things. Comprend. not compREhend, which is the english synonym that means to understand. No, I said comprend. That is FRENCH for understand, and no I did not do it on purpose in a franglaise kind of way. I said it in French by accident. Apparently I am so tired I don't know what language I am speaking in. I guess I should just be glad that I didn't start speaking Xhosa - the clicking might have freaked the customers out!!

Now it is time to sleep

Can I have a do-over? Please?

I guess it was bound to happen eventually. I mean, I try to stay organized and on top of things. I even bought a cute planner so that I can keep track of all the things going on in my life and I thought I was on the ball. But really, when you are working 54 hours a week, 13 days in a row or more, I was bound to drop the balle eventually. It's just that eventually came much sooner than I thought!

I have never really had problems with mondays. It's not my favourite day of the week, but they are not unbearable normally. Today may have changed my view of mondays.

So now you are all asking, "Laura, what happened?!" Actually you are probably asking "Lolo, what happened?" but I will pretend that you use my real name. Well, let me tell you what happened. I left my house today at the anticipated time, 12:15 to catch my bus. It takes me two buses to get to my job at Arvato which is where I was going. My first bus was 10 minutes late. I arrived at the corner where I connect to my second bus in time to watch it go past. This is normally not a big deal because this second bus runs every 10 minutes so I had time to walk into Starbucks for a peppermint mocha. This helped me pretend that it was Christmas even though I was not even wearing a coat because it is so warm. I caught the next bus easily because it too was about 10 minutes late. So I walked into Arvato at around 1:20.

They were surprised to see me. Sometimes this is ok, because I generally pick what days I go in depending on my schedule at Zehrs so sometimes they forget when I am coming. But today this got me worried and I pulled out my nice new, very cute planner to see what was up. Oh S#$*t. I am supposed to be working at ZEHRS!!! not Arvato, and my shift started at 1. By this time it is 1:30 and I call Zehrs, explain what is going on to my less than impressed boss (who, thankfully, is also the mother of one of my best friends and knows that I am not normally this stupid!)She asks if I can be there by 2. I laugh. I have to take the bus home, then change, then take the bus to zehrs. There is no way that I can do this in half an hour. So because this post is getting long, I will sum up saying that I got to Zehrs at around 3pm, two hours late and even later than I should have been because all my buses were, of course, late. Three hours later the day was over and I had spent as much time on the bus and waiting for stupid late buses as I had actually working. Now I am hoping that I wake up in the morning and it is monday again so I can try it again and get it right this time. Either that or I wake up with no memory of this stupid stressful day.

Chillin'

It's friday night and instead of going out bowling with friends like I had planned, I'm just chillin in my room. The parents have monopolized the living room so I tried to watch a DVD on my laptop. Those of you who have watched DVDs on my laptop may remember it's annoying tendancy to freeze up and throw a hissy fit. This has not changed so I didn't get too far into it. So now I am sitting on my floor listening to musique and chillin. My cat is reading over my shoulder.

Christmas is starting to freak me out. Amp has posted about feeling stressed out about the season, and I can relate although I think my stress is different. Last year I didn't really think about Christmas until December 20th - this is when I got on a bus to go to Botswanna to visit with the Allison-Jones family with whom I spent Christmas. This year Christmas is freaking me out. Even the though of going to the mall makes me a little sick to my stomach and the craziness of the season at Zehrs is driving me a little nuts. All of this would be easier to deal with if only we had snow to go along with it. It was 12 degrees here today! I want snow!!

So to combat the freakin I have been doing more chillin. I have been a little bit of a hermit the past two weeks or so. Aside from work, and my small group on tuesdays, I haven't socialized much except for the tupperware party last night. That was fun and I met my friend Mel's baby and I got free stuff:) More on that another time. I am being an introvert extrordinaire these days. Chillin is good.

Silly Questions with Obvious Answers

So I was sitting in church this morning (WMB, not grace), reading the bulletin and there is an announcement asking if I would like to go to Rwanda next summer. Um, let me think for .000012 seconds .... YES!!! I would like to go to Rwanda, and so I think I will. The trip isn't till august and it is only for three weeks but I am already very excited. I was in a great mood my entire shift at Zehrs today. That says alot!
Then after church Suzanna Muntz (sorry about spelling...) asked if I might be interested in a position working with Refugees and training volunteers to work with Refugees coming into our area. Let me see. Um... YES!!! So far this position doesn't even really exist I think and they are applying for funding so it may just be volunteer at least for awhile, but still it sounds really cool.

So does anyone else have any silly questions with obvious answers for me?!

Please Clear the Area

So obviously I have just been listening to Imagem Heap - I can't spell it and I have trouble saying it, but I like listening to it. It get that song in my head all the time and have random urges to say "Please clear the area" outloud. Thankfully I can usually keep it in my head since I'm pretty sure that people will think I am nuts if I actually say it outloud.

I saw a crazy thing yesterday. I was waiting for the bus after work because I didn't want to walk in the cold cold dark. Two university students who had just been shopping at Zehrs came up to me to ask where the bus stop going in the opposite direction was. I pointed it out, across the street and down a little. So they went to cross the street at the crosswalk, the little green man staring happily at them, beckoning them across the street. While the guy went to cross and the Big Red Pickup stopped at the red light went to turn right and HIT HIM!!! My heart stopped. It totally freaked me out. I went over to see if he was ok, and he was so everything is fine, but it was pretty scary. Stupid guy in the Big Red Pickup got out too to see if the guy was hurt, but he had to not be paying attention AT ALL since the guy was directly infront of the driver's seat when he was hit. So then in all the commotion they missed their bus which only comes every half hour. Suck.

On tuesday I had a really great small group. We talked about the story in Luke 5 when Jesus calls Peter and James and John to be disciples. We talked about how Jesus was calling them to see themselves differently, because they weren't the type of people typically called to be anyone's disciples - they didn't have the education, they hadn't met the standards of the day needed to be a disciple. But Jesus called them anyway. He believed in them, that they could be like him. I'm pretty sure that I studied the whole culture around how people were chosed as disciples, either in the Jewish context or maybe in the Greek context, but it was neat to be reminded that they were chosen in order to imitate their masters, to be like their teachers. So when Jesus chose his disciples he believed they could be like him. So he believes that we can be like him.

We talked alot about identity and how we see ourselves. We were challenged to think about what it is that we need to see differently in ourselves so that we can see ourselves more clearly. So far I haven't got a real answer.
Sorry if this didn't make tons of sense to everyone. I think I skipped over some things, but it makes sense to me. :)

Is it really Random?

Several people, including myself, have the word varification tool activated on their blogs. The goal of this is to prevent tons of spam comments by making a commenter type the random set of letters seen on their screen. Or at least they are supposed to be random. Lately I have been questioning this, with good reason. I posted a comment on Diedre's blog a couple weeks ago and the word varification letters were SEXCY or something pretty close, I can't remember exactly. Today I posted on someone's blog - I have already forgotten on whose - and the random letters looked suspiciously close to the F word. Anyone else get some interesting "random" words while posting comments? I am curious now.

Doing my Civic Duty

I voted today!! I haven't voted since the federal election that happened in highschool! This is not because I had a lapse in my appreciation of my "civic duty" but rather because I have not been around to vote. So today I voted in the municiple and city elections.

A big issue on the election platforms, or at least on the minds of many voters, was the proposed development of sensitive land on the outskirts of Waterloo. Our area depends on ground water for our drinking water and ground water depends on wetlands and different morains and recharge areas in order to keep the levels up and to keep the water "clean." The proposed development is on the edge of one of these morains and would be built on a so called recharge area. There has been research done and apparently it suggests that the development won't hurt the morain or jeopordize the drinking water. Whatever, I do not have the knowledge or understanding to say whether that is true or not. What concerned me about the whole thing was the attitude of city council when the thing came to a vote. The majority of the council stated that they did not think it was their place to get in the way of progress or development. I strongly disagree with that statement and my voting today was my way of voicing that. Apparently other people agreed with me. If development is potentially detrimental to the community or in any way endangers the future of the community it is not only the council's place to get in the way of it, it is the council's duty to! Do they think that corporations and developers are going to be acting in the community's and the environment's best interests?! Hopefully now that we have a new mayor and several new councillors future issues of this nature will be handled differently.

And so ends my rant on local politics.

Tupperware party

Ok, so I am hosting a tupperware party. There is something a little weird in my mind about me, of all people, hosting one of these things. In my defence I got roped into hosting it by opening a thingy at my cousin's wedding shower. I wanted to win the ice cream scoop but I won a free party instead and since it gave my cousin extra money to spend, I am hosting it.

Actually it might be fun. I am inviting people I haven't seen in a while, all my regular friends and new friends from both my jobs. So it will be interesting to see all my worlds collide!! Also, two of my friends have babies and both are bringing them!! extra funs with babies.

So all of you who are too far away, you can whistfully think of all the fun and skor cake you are missing!! :) The rest of you should just come. :)

Crazy week of crazy

First of all, apparently when I set my blog settings so that anyone could comment, I accidentally changed it so only members of my blog could comment. Oops!! That mistake has been remedied. Thanks to Steph for pointing it out.

Next. My life is crazy. I know everyone else's is to, that I am not alone in the craziness. That makes me feel better. Misery loves company right!?

Last week Arvato, the office place where I work, had a recruting thing at the mall. I got to help. Now this may sound exciting but really it involved me being paid to sit in the mall and read, write letters and talk to the occasional crazy person. Ok, so actually that is pretty exciting! I wrote lots of letters to South Africa that I have yet to actually put in the mailbox, I read four books including Rereading A Swiftly Tilting Planet which made me happy. However, I realized that when I bought the "trilogy" I got that, A wrinkle in time and An Acceptable Time. Um... SOmething is missing...

Recently at Zehrs we have been collecting donations for "Toonies for Tummies" which raises money for breakfast programs in schools for kids whose parents can't afford to give them breakfast every day. This is a good thing. It feeds the hungry.

During the week leading up to halloween (wow I have not posted in eons!), a lady came through my till. I asked her, "Would you like to donate a toonie today to support toonies for tummies and school breakfast programs for hungry children?" She said no. She started ranting about how in North America people spend billions of dollars on candy for halloween and there were hungry people and that was wrong and so she wasn't going to give money to that. I got confused and thought that maybe she had misunderstood what I had asked, and that she thought we were raising money to buy candy or something, so I calmly and polietly pointed out once again that we were raising money to help hungry kids and that if she were concerned about hungry people this would be a great opportunity for her to do something about it. She kept ranting about how she wasn't going to donate because there were hungry people and halloween is a waste of money when there are hungry people in our area....

I do not understand the way some people think. If someone can explain to me how not donating to help hungry people is a good way to take a stand that there are hungry people, I would be interested to hear it....