The end of the work week is upon us. I get paid today, but unfortunately not via direct deposit. Hopefully next week it will be working. I did end up getting my employee discount cards, however, and gave one to Eddie.

I stopped into Walmart this morning and picked up some yarn for the afghan I’m working on. It’s a creamy white color and a deep red (instead of the pastel pink it was asking for), and aside from just realizing this morning that I’ve been doing a basic stitch completely wrong since I first started, things are shaping up fine. I managed to lose my ATM card at some point between the cash register and the car, so I requested a new one. This sucks because I’ve been lucky enough to avoid being forced to chain my nice 4-digit PIN to a 6-digit one, and I had memorized the card number, expiration, and 3-digit extra code. Now I’ll have to relearn all of that and update all sorts of automatic debits for hosting and FFXI.

Tonight I work until closing. Hopefully it won’t be too crazy in there. It’s supposed to be raining pretty heavily at times this afternoon, and from what I heard about Wednesday, the store was empty due to New Englander’s complete fear of rain. If it’s not busy, I can get out on time. I love getting the 15-20 minutes of OT, but I hate having to drive down to Coventry and not get to Mom’s until 10pm. Yesterday was normal and I think we’d done about 120 scripts by the time I left at 6pm, and it was pretty quiet all afternoon so I doubt they did more than 150 all day. Eddie has to work tomorrow, which gives me the whole afternoon to work on my afghan in the morning and play a bit of FFXI in the afternoon.

It’s been a long, interesting weekend. We left early because Eddie needed to work all day, and left a note on the stairs letting Comrade know rent was going to be late. I got to Mom’s house early on Saturday morning, armed with a box of yarn and my 4 new pattern books. I started by making a kitten from some pinkish/purple yarn that I bought around Easter. All the old ladies at the shop thought it was the cutest thing around. By the time we’d left the shop, the only thing left to make on it was the white cheeks/nose/whiskers.

I ended up working on the kitten’s face later in the afternoon, and then starting a puppy after dinner. I picked up Eddie from work, and we went back to Mom’s for some dinner and to watch A History of Violence. No one but me liked the ending, and I firmly believe that both sex-scenes were excruciatingly painful to watch and completely pointless. Normally, I’d have nothing bad to say about any movie scene that ends up showing Vigo Mortenson’s ass, but neither scene did anything for the movie. By the time the movie was over, I had most of the puppy finished, and was happy. We went home, let Pickle out for a while, showered, and went to snuggle in bed and watch SNL. I thought Tom Hanks was pretty good, the digital short wasn’t anywhere near as good as some of the others they’ve done (I think they’re trying too hard to create the next big Lazy Sunday), and RHCP weren’t bad. It’s good to see that Flea is just as… um…. Flea-ish as he’s always been.

Sunday we were back over at Mom’s house because we were going to the flea market. Only Mom found anything good, the rest of us just got more sunburn. When we got home we watched some TV, had some chicken wings, and Eddie grilled some ham steaks for dinner. I finished my lteeny puppy, which Mom is still threatening to steal. We hung out for a bit after dinner, then made our way up to Walmart to grab some oil for the car. Another shower and then more snuggling to watch TV and then get some sleep.

Today Eddie is taking a load of paperwork to Kinko’s to get copied and mailed about to various parts of Canada (I won’t get into the details at the moment). I think he’s bringing home some little $1 frozen pizzas for dinner. Yummy. I’ve got my hot sauce ready and waiting. He should also be grabbing a phone card for my phone, because as Nanny said, I can’t get a job without being able to get phone calls.

So, guess who received 4 new pattern books in the mail the other day and whipped up a pig in a couple of hours? He’s for sale at the moment.

Eddie and I have had a near-perfect day home today. He got to sleep in; I got up early because he was snoring. We showered and headed down to Warwick to the store I was in because I needed to get my final evaluation picked up. Of course, the pharmacist who was doing the eval hadn’t done it yet, which may as well just completely fuck me over. She tells me she only heard about it on Wednesday. That’s all well and good, but seeing how this is Friday, it just goes to show how seriously they took this whole experience.

From Warwick we drive up to Lincoln, where I sit around for 15 minutes waiting for the coordinator to finish up with the student she had in her office. I’m thinking I’ll just hand over the timesheets, explain the eval is on its way, and be done with the whole thing. No, unfortunately I’ve got a 3-page survey to fill out detailing my thoughts on the course and the externship, and then sitting for another 15 minutes while she tried to straighten out several other students’ problems. I finish, give it to her, and she’s on her way out to do something else, and shuffles me off to one of the women who handles all the job placement assistance, who wants to update my resume with the externship.

“Now, what sort of skills did you learn while on the job?” she asks while openning up my resume.

“I ran a register and counted pills.”

“You can’t put ‘counted pills’ on the resume. There must be a technical term for it. Prescription processing? Dosage calculation?”

“It’s not processing because that might imply data entry, which I did for a whole 90 minutes over the course of 6 weeks. And it’s not calculation because I get the label, look at the number printed beside ‘Quantity’ and just count the right amount.” We ended up leaving about an hour after we got there, got lunch, and came home.

Tomorrow Eddie is going to work, and I’m going to Mom’s house, because the women-folk are heading to Riverside to get our hair done. The woman who cuts mine said that she might dye it for free as a graduation gift, so we’ll see what happens.

I’m so tired. While I worked only 30 hours I’m completely drained. I went to East Providence for some training today, and finished up about an hour early. I was supposed to go to the store to get my evaluation done after training, however I was on the schedule as being at training until 1pm, and I knew shit would fly if I showed up at 12:30pm, so I sat in the car and read the last 70 pages or so of The Davinci Code before heading inside. Eventually I got the eval done, and I’m now listed as mostly “satisfactory” with a few “proficient” ratings and a bunch of “not satisfactory” things, with a note explaining that the “not satisfactory” things are things that I haven’t had the chance to do yet. The pharm doing the review for me also said that they haven’t been putting me at production as much as they should be, and admitted that they’ve left me at the register for longer than they probably should have, but that’s because they’re short-handed and even though they’ve got a bunch of techs, half of us aren’t trained and it’s more efficient to have us work the register than slow everyone down in the back.

I finished my jean skirt the other day, fully aware that it’s about 2 sizes too small for me. However, I made a shorter one out of a pair of too-big pink cords, and tonight I slit the seams in my $40 Lane Bryant jeans that I bought right before school started because they’re way too big on me and even a belt wouldn’t keep them looking nice, since I’d still look like my ass is swimming in them. At least if I turn them into a skirt , I can wear a belt and it will look better than having saggy-ass jeans.

I think tonight might be an early to bed kind of night. I’m tired and achey, and I think I just want to curl up in bed with Eddie and let him rub lotion into my feet, get naked, and snuggle with him.

I’ve been rather busy this week or so. I spent the weekend crocheting another llamma for a girl in class who requested a llamma and a sheep for her kids’ Easter baskets. Well, the llamma turned out absolutely adorable, and coincidentally I received my book of amigurumi patterns on Friday afternoon, so I asked the girl if she wanted me to continue on with the sheep, or if she wanted to pick something out of the book instead.

And that was how a a simple commission of a llamma and a sheep turned into “I need one for each basket, could you just pick out 7 of these to make up the rest?” So guess what I’m doing until Easter? That’s right. Making a wide assortment of animals - 5 for girls, 3 for boys.

I guess that it’s a good thing I picked up 4.5lbs of chenille yarn yesterday - for free. That’s a lion and a cat with 4lbs to spare.

The exception to the crochet spree over the weekend was the FFXI marathon on Sunday. Very fun, even if we did have to play with morons for a while. I got called a dumbass, which amused everyone in the group.