Thanksgiving was pretty subdued. Mom's in Africa; Dad and Kenny went down to Southern California to visit my grandfather so it was just me at home. If this happened in the past, I'd usually go to dinner with Seanie's family, but this year I had a mountain of homework so I locked myself up in my house and ate instant food. Seanie brought some leftovers over, though, so I did get some turkey and stuffing in the end.

The holiday is all about the food though. At work the next day, the first question everyone always asked was "So what did you eat for Thanksgiving?" Hmm. Makes me hungry.

Black Friday wasn't as busy as we hoped. People were coming in, but a lot of the customers I helped weren't really in the holiday mindset yet. They were in the mood to shop for great deals or small gifts for themselves, but not quite in Christmas mode yet. Maybe I was just fishing a bad batch from the customer pool. At any rate, sometimes it felt like we were overstaffed at Lush, but sometimes we'd get a rush and need every soul in the store.

Seanie came to pick me up after work, so we went scouting out the mall for any deals. Most of the really good promotions ended at noon, so there wasn't much to entice us into the stores.
Lupicia had some really tasty looking holiday teas. White Christmas is back this year - white chocolate and apricot, it's SUPER yummy - as is strawberry-flavored Carol. There's a new tea called Orzo Cioccolata that looks a little different. It's barley tea with a chocolate/hazelnut flavor. I'm all over that one! But the Black Friday promo was over and I just bought some tea to help me get to sleep at night, so no purchase for me.
There's a new fancy chocolate/coffee shop. I can't remember the name, Belgian something. They're very expensive (although elegantly presented) and they weren't offering samples of any sort so Seanie and I didn't try anything. (I was totally stuffed anyway thanks to our store's potluck. Eggrolls, pizza and cheesecake, oh my!)

I found my old B&BW store manager Lisa working at L'Occitane. That was cool! I haven't seen her in a couple of years, but she said she looks for me when she walks by Lush. :-p I think I'd been working at Lush between six months and a year when she left B&BW? Anyway. That was neat. She and Renee, another former B&BW manager, work right next to each other, managing stores across the mall from each other. How funny that we're all at Valley Fair now. The management team of Lisa, Renee and Deborah was probably the longest lasting of all the bosses I had at B&BW, which has a horrible turnover rate.

Seanie bought a Playstation 3 yesterday, so he brought it over and we played Little Big Planet. Only the first level - I couldn't play more because I was sleepy and had homework to worry about. But someday soon my little Penguin Khan is going to take over the world!

So the schedule that I'm looking at for Winter 2010 is:

ARTS 002H 01 NATIVE ARTS OF MESOAMERICA/SOUTH AMERICA 4.0 MTWR 9:30AM - 10:20AM
ARTS 001B 01 ARCHITECT PAST & PRESENT 4.0 MTWR 10:30AM - 11:20AM
MATH 011. 09 FINITE MATHEMATICS 5.0 MTWRF 11:30AM - 12:20PM

ARTS 004B 02 INTERMEDIATE DRAWING 3.0 MW 12:30PM - 3:15PM
ARTS 015A 01 INTRO ACRYLIC PAINTING 3.0 TR 12:30PM - 3:15PM

I had to take a studio class this quarter, but I had trouble deciding between acrylic painting, oil painting or ceramics. Part of me really likes the idea of ceramics - taking something into your hands and forcing it into a shape - but there's only one section this quarter, and it doesn't fit into my schedule at all. Oil painting was only available Tuesday/Thursday evenings, which wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have a six hour gap between it and my previous class.

I need all of these classes for my AA degree and transfer, except for Arts 002H. I'm taking that one because I find Mesoamerican art absolutely baffling, and I need someone to explain it to me. (I'm not even sure where one can go in the SF Bay Area to see this culture's art.)

This will leave me with only one class that I *must* take in the spring, which will free up my time to take more studio classes (improving my lame art skills) or to seek out an internship at a local art museum.

In case I didn't tell you, my Mom's traveling abroad for a month. She left about a week ago (two weeks ago?) and won't be back until December 15th. She's been in Morocco, which she left yesterday, but not before this ordeal:

Well, today was one of those days you want to forget. American Airlines messed up my reservations so i ended up at the Casablanca airport without a ticket. The Iberia clerks sent me back and forth to buy another ticket and the clerk demanded cash. he said the cost was 4380 dh which is about 600 dollars. Luckily I had my Citibank cash withdrawl high enough so I got the money. The real cost was 2480 dh but he hid the receipt and just gave it to another clerk as I checked in and ran on the plane. So I got royally cheated but at least I got on the plane.

A very nice clerk at Iberia got the plane tickets fixed so i don´t have to buy separate tickets to everwhere else. I´ve written to Iberia about the cheating but other than getting American to pay for the real price of the flight, it looks like i´ve added to the pockets of one of the Iberian clerks in Casablanca. Perhaps my letters to American and Iberia will bring some results. Cheryl says to be consoled that i´m not still in Casablanca, alone!

We go to South Africa tomorrow night. One day in Madrid.

BASTARDS!!!

I got to work at RHA this morning and as I sat down at my desk, I realized that I had completely forgotten my purse, which contains my wallet and my day planner. That is really, really bad because I cannot live without my day planner. My life has become so strictly regulated that I need to have that thing with me hour-by-hour to determine what needs to get done. When I'm not following the precisely regimented days, chaos ensues.

I'm trying to remember what I planned to do today while I was at RHA: work on my biography of Joan Miro for art class, read a couple of chapters in my archaeology book to prepare for the midterm on Tuesday, finish some online problems for my Acct1C class, and apply to the EOPS programs at SJSU and SFSU. Tons of stuff. Then I realize that I didn't dress in proper dress code for Lush, so I'll have to go home during the break between the two jobs to get my clothes. THEN I realize I didn't decorate the t-shirt Debbie gave me for the Lushgiving party. (We're supposed to decorate the shirt with one of the charities supported by Lush.) So I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by it all.

I obviously need to cut back on something, and the quick answer would be time spent working at Lush. I really like my co-workers and the job itself can be quite fun, but it's a huge time commitment (12+ hours a week plus outside time for projects like carving pumpkins, decorating t-shirt, memorizing new product information, etc) and I can see my job performance suffering with every shift. When I come in for an evening shift, after a full day at school or RHA, I'm often so tired I can't remember basic things, like ingredients in a lotion or why using a toner is so important, and it can really hurt my customers' experiences.

But the money I make at Lush is being scrimped and saved toward my future SJSU tuition, which keeps on rising every semester. (I am trying to avoid student loans at all costs.) The products are great and there's no way I could afford them without the employee discount, so I'm quite reluctant to give that up. My co-workers are all lovely people, and talking with them is (unfortunately) the only real socializing I do these days!

It would be better if I could give away a shift once in a while, when I'm scheduled the night before an exam, but we're so tightly staffed that it's virtually impossible. The last two-three weeks I've been unsuccessful in every attempt to get another keyholder to work for me.

Well, we'll see. Debbie said she would only schedule me four days a week when school's out, which on the surface doesn't sound too bad, but I work three days at RHA so we're essentially looking at a seven day work week, and I've been doing that all quarter long. (School counts as a job, and this quarter it's been a friggin' tough and demanding one!) A Saturday afternoon or Wednesday morning off isn't the same as a whole day off, no matter how much I want it to be.

I'll figure it out later. Right now I've got to get back to studying, and helping the residents renting the Clubhouse today figure out how they're going to squeeze a wedding into the building this afternoon.

So I saw New Moon last night.

If you want to a have a virgin New Moon experience when you go to see the movie, stop reading now because I'm going to spew out all my thoughts without filtering for potential spoilers.

Last chance to back out.

OK.

The sparkle factor is still majorly underwhelming. I mean, come on. A major plot point revolves around Edward stepping out into the sunlight, sans t-shirt to show off his glittering body, which will reveal the existence of vampires to the world. Ignoring how stupid that is - in a world where this can be seen in every major city no one's going to give a sparkling man a second glance - whenever a vampire steps into the sunlight he just looks a little sweaty. If you're gonna sparkle, I want a friggin' disco ball effect, not something that could be covered up with a little bit of foundation powder.

I still think Kristen Stewart is an AWFUL actress. Her voice just bothers me, always so hoarse and flat and rather boyish, but considering what a piece of blah work that Bella is maybe Stewart's secretly a genius and capturing the character perfectly.

They did a better job with make-up than in the first movie. Edward's white skin still looks incredibly fake, but at least he doesn't have obvious make-up lines at the neck all the time. I think Robert Pattison, as dreamboat vampire Edward Cullen, has not managed to string together a single coherent sentence in these movies. Even the most basic comments are filled with awkward pauses and are strung out for maximum non-effect. I know my coworkers are just mad about Edward, but I think he's:
A/ A creep.
B/ Controlling.
C/ Manipulative bastard
D/ Weird-looking (His huge forehead makes him look like a caveman)
E/ Distant, unemotive, and freakin' WHINY
F/ Also, an unrealistic prude.

So with the two main actors sucking it hard, I thought it was going to be a loooooong movie. And it was. New Moon has some serious pacing issues if you ask me. Maybe it's just a consequence of seeing the movie at 12:01 am (although it didn't actually start 'til well after 12:30 once you factor in delays and previews) but the first 1/2 hour reeeeeally dragged and the last 45 minutes draaaaaaaaagged even more. But most of the secondary, background characters are really, really well done. Characters like Jessica, Charlie, and Billy Black are given far more development than they got in the book just through the nuances of the actors' performances, while many of the vampires - Laurent, Jasper, Alice - are actually cool. (OK, Alice was cool in the novel, but I literally remember nothing about Jasper from that book.)

I refuse to declare myself Team anything, but I definitely sympathize with Jacob in this book and this movie. He just gets a horribly raw deal all around. He's obviously crushing on Bella since Day One (WHY? SHE HAS NO APPEALING TRAITS WHATSOEVER) and bending over backwards to please her, and she just brushes him off whenever the thought of Edward crosses her mind. How tragic for him. The kid playing Jacob (Taylor something?) did a really great job. I love that he doesn't feel the need to fill scenes with awkward mouth breathign like his costars. But at the end, I liked the character and wanted him to get the girl, even though she's no prize. (I really don't like Bella. Have you noticed?) Even when he's pulling total douchebag moves (telling Edward Charlie's planning a funeral, for example) Jacob is so much more...well, human than Mr. Cullen.

It's pretty cool that the Native American characters are actually played by people of Indian descent. Rock on, casting.

I don't remember the 'Dear Alice' device that Bella was constantly using from the book. Was it in there? I didn't bother to re-read before seeing the film, so most major details/omissions went unnoticed by me.

One last moment of Bella/Kristen Stewart hating before I stop: Her nightmare screams? TOTALLY LAME AND ANNOYING.

Edit to add: How did I forget Alice's vision of Bella becoming a vampire at the end? IT'S LITERALLY THIRTY SECONDS OF EDWARD AND BELLA RUNNING THROUGH THE WOODS, SPARKLING/SWEATING, and was probably the most inappropriate/unintentionally hilarious scene ever. Frolicing in the woods in sundresses! As vampires! It was horrible.

Edit 2: The constant shirtlessness of the men, and actually just a lot of the lighting and general camera work made me think of old Backstreet Boys music videos, specifically the one where they're all running around in the rain. It's like, chaste gay porn. Without the sex. Obviously. Or something.

One of our assignments in my color/design class this weekend was to draw two postcards. We'll mail them to another student in the class, and when we receive a postcard we are to add to the design. Captions, collage, whatever...it becomes collaborative art.

Well, here's my two completed images (awkward photo taken with a digital camera; I really need to figure out how to hook up my scanner again):

It was a quiet week in San Jose, at least on my part. I had a painting project due in my Color class on Wednesday, and my project was well-received. It wasn't exciting; we had to do color charts based on the Munsell Color system, starting with grayscale and working with a certain hue to maximum saturation based on the value. I chose yellow because it was the easiest - or, at least, it would have fewer squares to blend and paint. It turned out OK; the painting was a little sloppy because I can't control a brush for the life of me but not bad. When we hung the paintings in class, it was really interesting because you could see that some people really struggle with the concept of value. But most of the paintings were really good, and made me wish I'd picked a more challenging color. The majority of the class went with blue or green. I overheard several people saying stuff like "Oh, the yellow one looks really good" while they were in front of mine, so that was uplifting. There's one guy in the class who is really good with paint and color - he finishes the assignments in a single day and spaces out during the lectures, but still does just fine - and I saw him talking to another student about my color grid and giving it a thumbs-up. That was a mood lifter, since he can be really critical when he thinks you've done something wrong.

I had several assignments that I had neglected to turn in for my painting class, so I got those to my teacher and that was a relief, too.

--

Last night Seanie and I went over to Bonbon's house for tea. That was fun. Her apartment is really cute. She works at Teavana so she had a bookshelf that was competely filled with Teavana tea tins; it was amazing. It was a very last minute thing; she texted me around 8 or so to see if I wanted to come over and eat brownies and drink tea (but of course I want to) and we headed over right around 10. It's nice having one of my co-workers living out in my area of town; most of the rest of the Lush crew live out by Valley Fair so last-minute visits are a much more difficult proposition.

--

The Manager at RHA is going to be gone for a few weeks on a cruise. Lucky guy. I'm jealous. It's his first big vacation since he started here, and it's going to be weird not having him around. Hopefully nothing major happens while he's away.

Ooh! One of the residents just offered me a free lunch, so I gotta go mooch. :D Talk to ya later, Internet!

So for Halloween this year I was Norma Desmond*:


*Just kidding. But seriously, I've got the face down, don't you think?

--

So for Halloween, there were no parties or crazy nights out because I went to work at Lush. Luckily, we were having a party at the store, so it was less work-like than usual, but that meant I had to dress up in a costume. Naturally, I just wanted to cheap out and refused to buy a new costume, so I spent some time rummaging through my closet and eventually concluded I could pull together some sort of Amy Brown fairy outfit. I had everything except wings, so last night I sent Seanie out to brave the crowds at one of those super-sized Halloween stores and he bought me some cheap black angel wings. Quality-wise, they're awful, of course, and the straps were made so poorly the wings didn't come close to sitting in the proper part of my back. But with a couple of pins we were able to get them to stay in place.

My final costume (and my manager as a pirate wench):


While I was at work, kids were trick-or-treating at the mall. So many kids. We ran out of candy after only about an hour and a half, and we'd had at least 8 or 9 bags of the stuff. It was crazy. There were a lot of customers, considering it was Halloween, but that was all thanks to the fact that Lush was having a 'Dead Man's Party' and you got tons of free stuff if you came in. But the customers came in waves, and there were a lot of employees milling around, so I didn't really have much to do in the store at the beginning of my shift. I ended up going to the doorway and telling kids we had no more candy, cutting them off before they could come in the store and set off our conversion tracker.
(Not that it worked. They'd still go in the store anyway, hoping someone else was nicer.)

It's funny, but I got a lot of parents asking if they could take pictures with their kid. I guess they can't get candy so they'll take a picture of the gothic angel instead? Sure, why not? It warms the cockles of my heart to know that in ten years, kids will look through the family photos and will stop and look at the strange woman and say "Mom, who the hell is that?" and Mom will reply "I dunno, some random mall chick."

One of my coworkers was dressed up as Lady Gaga, so if you walked through Valley Fair between the hours of 6 and 8 you very likely saw this dancing in the doorway of our store:


It was so funny. "Lady Gaga" was really into the dancing, and we had people stopping to stare, take photos, and record videos of her dancing. I could not stop laughing. It was so funny. Bonnie is my hero for having the balls to dance while strangers gawk for at least ten repetitions of Gaga's songs.


Lady Gaga and I.


Gaga, Abby and Peter:


Lady Gaga, a crazy 80's Lady and a Pirate Wench walk into a bar...

...actually, I just realized that set-up doesn't work because only the Pirate is of legal drinking age.

One of my newest co-workers, Elena was the other gothically-inclined lady. She had this fantastic kestrel mask and mantle that she couldn't wear because it scared too many kids, apparently. I thought it looked great.


A customer came in wearing the cutest Max (Where the Wild Things Are) costume:


Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella (actually a Marie Antoinette costume):


At nine o'clock the store was closed, registers shut down and we were ready to go home. We made our monthly sales target and blew our store into bonus-land. Great night!

The store is closed and it is time to go home!

What a nasty week.

Four midterms, one of which I didn't even find out about until this Monday!
Monday the 26th - Accounting
Wednesday the 28th - Art History (Modern)
Thursday the 29th - Archaeology
Friday the 30th - Statistics

I feel so burned out, but at least there's only one more to force myself through.

--

In other news, there was an event at DeAnza for transfer students today, so I talked to representatives from San Jose State, San Francisco State, and CSU East Bay. Sounds like my plan for a double major may get scuttled; apparently the schools are really cracking down on students spending an extra year at university to get extra degrees. Man. That sucks. The best chance I would have would be at East Bay, but that's my back-up back-up school. It's geographically inconvenient, and hasn't got a reputation that can compare with other schools. I mean, I only know one person who ever went there. But they're the only school that doesn't currently have a policy in place against second bachelor's degrees.

San Jose State is still my first choice, though, since it's close to home. SFSU is the convenient back-up, but I might have to quit my job at RHA to go there, and I would genuinely hate to do that.

My accounting teacher - the rather frumpy one that reminds me of Dolores Umbridge - is not a very good teacher. She uses the powerpoint slides provided by the textbook's publisher in her lectures, which is fine, but she doesn't really use them. Sometimes she'll speed through the slides so fast you can't write any of the definitions down - but she quizzes you on the same definitions later. Other times she'll being doing a demonstration problem on the whiteboard when she'll veer off and do all these extra calculations to determine things not required in the problem. For example, the problem might ask what the variable costs per unit is for a certain sales number, but she'll also work the numbers to see what would happen if we increased sales ten percent, or if we started manufacturing a second line of sweaters, or all these other funny details not called for in the original problem. It gets really confusing.

She also seems to have a set number of questions we need to ask her - if we aren't asking questions, we weren't paying enough attention. A few days ago she went off on a little rant that we should be paying attention because she's the "interpreter" of the book. We could just read the textbook, she conceded, but we couldn't understand it without her help so we ought to pay attention to her. But when you do ask a question, she doesn't answer it very well, either pointing at where she's done math on the board and telling you to look there, or referring you to the textbook anyway!

Also, if you're ever late she gives you the stink eye, and continues to glare at you for the rest of the quarter. Seriously. Whenever she looks into my back corner, she looks so angry, like she can't believe I have the audacity to come to class...and that's when I'm on time.

I'm really stumped on one of the chapters - Process Cost Accountings makes absolutely no sense to me. I'm hoping to ask accounting teacher from the summer for help, but I don't know if I'll be able to find him before the next accounting midterm. :-/ At this rate, though, I'm seriously thinking that my best helper will be Dr. Wikipedia. Again.

Sooo behind in school. Not good.
Three midterms next week. Also not good.
I'm tellin' ya, by Friday I'm gonna keel over and die.

--

Crazy resident today: She takes her dog out for a walk. Near a pond in the common area, she stumbles into a swarm of wasps and gets stung. Her dog gets stung. They're both traumatized. In the process of escaping she drops her sunglasses and her cell phone, as well as the doggie-doo bags she carried with her. Her dog's poo, which I guess she was in the middle of cleaning up, is left on the ground. She and the dog go home and puff up like balloons.

She calls the office. She wants one of the Maintenance guys to go up and check the wasps because those things were aggressive and nasty. Fine. That's kinda in their job description, right? If there's a nest right next to the path, they should know about. BUT this resident also wants someone (of course she doesn't specify who, other than not her) to go up to the wasp-infested path and get her cell phone and her sunglasses for her.

Give. Me. A. Break. Get your own fuckin' stuff that YOU dropped. If the wasps are such a terror, you're a horrible person for expecting someone else to go brave that. If the wasps have left and you're just too chicken to go up there yourself...well, too bad.

The leader of the Maintenance Crew happened to be in the office and we were chatting before she called, so I told him about the call and he said he'd take a look, but he was having a busy day so it wasn't exactly high priority.

Lady called back an hour or two later when I got back from my lunch break (she may have tried to call sooner, but I wasn't there) to see if her cell phone was at the office yet. I told her no, it wasn't, and I hadn't seen anyone from the Maintenance team so I didn't know if they'd even had a chance to go up yet. She repeated that there was no way she was walking up there to get her stuff. She had been stung and it was horrible and she was pissed. I said nothing, because really, there was nothing to say. I wasn't going to apologize for the wasps being there, because that's an act of God and the office had nothing to do with it. I wasn't going to volunteer to go retrieve her stuff, because that's totally outside my job description. I wasn't going to say "Get the fuck OVER it" because that is a quick way to lose a job. So I said nothing other than non-commital "Hmm-hmm." She said she would call back in a while to see if her cell phone had been brought into the office. I said "OK" and she hung up.

FIVE MINUTES LATER (ten minutes max) she came to the office door and asked for her cell phone. I told her it wasn't there, and as far as I knew no one had a chance to go up to the pond and get it - just like I told her on the phone. She wanted someone to go and get it RIGHT NOW - but I told her that no one was there. The Maintenance manager was somewhere else on the property or gone for the day; the one crew member on duty was hanging party lights for an evening event, a job planned for him for days. I wasn't going to pull him from it. She gave me a A Dirty Look, but I sure wasn't going to go trotting up the path for her sunglasses. Finally she muttered something about going back to the hospital and left.

She's a very vocal resident, so I'm sure she'll call Monday and leave my bosses nasty messages about my lack of customer service and the insufficient speed with which we reacted. And all I have to say is this:
YOU'RE THE IDIOT WHO PANICKED AND DROPPED YOUR STUFF. GO GET IT YOURSELF.
YES, I REALIZE YOU ARE IN PAIN BECAUSE YOU WERE STUNG BY WASPS, BUT IT'S STILL YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO RETRIEVE YOUR OWN BELONGINGS.
Yeesh.

--

So it was already a bad day when I got to Lush, and right before we closed I got another *delightful* customer. Lush has a promotion going right now where if you spend $40, you can pick out a free BUBBLE BATH. It's a pretty rockin' deal, since it includes any bath bomb, including the $8.95 Comforter and the $11.95 Blue Skies. So this lady comes in with her posse of fresh import Asians. They don't really interact with the staff, other than to establish that they know the promotion and know the Lush products. After she shops for 15-20 minutes, she comes up to the register. She wants to spend exactly $40 to get her free item, and hands me her items very carefully. The item she wants for free she keeps separate, balled up in her hand where I can't see it. I figure it must be one of the expensive bubble baths, and she wants to make sure I don't charge her for it. Whatever.

Her first total was $32, so she picks out another item, which brings her up to $39. Then she takes something out and replaces it with something slightly more expensive to bring herself up to $40. Finally she hands over the free item she's been hoarding away from me, and when I open it up I see it's a Floating Island Bath Melt. Bath melts are cocoa butter confections that make the bath water moisturizing and luxurious. They're also, unfortunately, not part of the promotion. When I point this out gently, her face immediately darkens like a spoiled child's.
Her: "But I was here before and she said it was OK."
Me: " I'm sorry, but the bath melt is not included in the promotion as a free item."
Her: "They let me do it last time!"
Me: "They may have been able to make an exception then, but I'm not a manager and I do not have the ability to override the promotion. I can only give you bubble baths for free."
Her: **seriously, she looks like a child about to cry because Mommy won't buy her ice cream**
Her: "Give me this one free or I won't buy any!"
Me: *shrug* "I can't. Sorry."

She turns and storms out with her crew, and I start un-bagging the items in her basket and my co-workers help me put them away. As the exchange had progressed I started to recognize her - she's a semi-regular pain in the ass who ALWAYS come in and tries to twist the promotions to get better deals or asks for excessive samples or special services, like cutting bath bombs in half (which we aren't supposed to do because it's dangerous). You'd think by now she'd be so horrified by our customer service she'd stop showing up, but no luck. Oh well. I'm sure I'll see her again during the Christmas season.

Poll #1474049
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

Would you bring your kids to someone else's house, unannounced?

My mom is a member of a bluegrass group, and they have meetings at our house once or twice a month. Today, one of the members of this group (whom I've never seen before, so she's either new or someone's wife/sister/whatever) and she brought her two-year old with her. I don't like kids, and I especially don't like surprise kids. Mom had no idea this child was coming until she heard it talking to itself as it entered the house.

Even worse, the owner of the child didn't bring anything to amuse it. No books, no crayons, no toys. Nothing. So first my mom looked to see if we had anything suitable, but we haven't had a kid that young in this house for twenty years. Naturally, we have nothing. So they give the kid a permanent marker - a sharpie! - and a piece of paper and she starts scribbling on it. You just KNOW that the two-year old is going to eventually miss the paper and permanently ruin our table.

I think it's horribly tacky to bring a child to someone's house without asking - especially when the person is, at best, a very casual acquaintance and at worse a complete stranger. But if you do have to bring a child with you due to some sort of emergency, give it a way to amuse itself! I mean, how hard is it to keep a coloring book or a toy doll or WHATEVER in the car?

I had some painting to do tonight, but I don't really want to play with toxic chemicals while some munchkin is wandering around looking for stuff to stick in its mouth.

My family went to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on Sunday evening and I gotta say, I was expecting supreme mediocrity. Instead, CWACOM was hilarious. I think I was leaning over ever five minutes and elbowing Seanie. "HE'S JUST LIKE YOU!!" I'd whisper, "YOU'RE JUST LIKE THE SCIENTIST GUY BUT WITHOUT THE SCIENCE!" Or, "HA HA HE DID SOMETHING AWKWARD AND LAME THAT'S WHAT YOU DO PUMPKIN!!!"

But seriously, that was such a silly and fun movie. I don't know why they don't make more like that.

The Christmas products are in at Lush. I helped set everything out on Tuesday night, after the store closed. We don't have all the Christmas gifts in, and we were missing the Fairy Tails body scrub, but I *think* everything else was there.



In other barely-Lush-related news, I visited Melissa at the hospital yesterday. (She's one of my coworkers at Lush, who went in for back surgery on Monday.) She seems to be healing up OK, all things considered. She's nearly mastered the use of her walker and was wheeling laps around the recovery center yesterday. That was pretty cool. She might be home by now; her doctor had to sign her off this morning but she said she'd be able to go home today.

I saw two performances over the weekend - Coppelia on Thursday (I start the weekend early) and Rent on Sunday night - and finally got around to writing 'em up. Feel free to read if you're interested. They were both shows worth seeing.

OK, I know that those of you who live in snowier climes are probably rolling your eyes as I say this, but school was canceled today due to the rain.
I'm very excited. I had a Statistics midterm today, and now I have a whole extra day to Not Study for it!!!

It's utterly wussy not to have class because of rain. I freely admit it. But the power's out and everything in our classrooms now revolves around technology, so if I went out to campus I'd just be sitting on my bum, in the dark, staring at the teacher struggling to demonstrate problems without the aid of powerpoint and projectors. It'd be tragic, so I will kindly spare my teachers the trauma.

So do I buckle down and get caught up on my studies, or spend a restful day off vegging? Decisions, decisions...

Rent is one of my favorite musicals. I was so excited when they did that movie a few years back, because I figured that would be the only chance I'd ever get to see the original cast perform the roles they originated on Broadway back in 1996. However, a few months back I heard that a touring Rent production would be coming to San Francisco in October, and Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal would be returning as Mark and Roger, and I was like OH YES I'M GONNA SEE THAT WOOOHOOOOO!

So my brother and I left San Jose an hour and a half before the show started, which should have been plenty of time to get to the Curran Theatre, but there were two strikes against us:
1/ We got caught in bridge traffic and didn't know the San Francisco streets well enough to try to navigate without our precious Google directions
2/ We got lost anyway and spent waaaaaaaay too long trying to figure out how to get where we were going.

I was so bummed; we missed all of my favorite songs because we were So. Embarrassingly. Late. Rent, One Song Glory, and Out Tonight were all over by the time we arrived. Such a bummer. :( But what can you do? I screwed up in our timing and then it took us forever to find the theatre. It happens. (Totally sucked, though; those tickets were for the cheap seats but it was still a lot of money for someone working part-time at Lush! If I had more money, I'd buy another set of tickets and go with Seanie so I could see the whole thing, but I haven't got the change to waste.)

What I did see was awesome for the most part. Anthony Rapp sounds the same, and still looks youthful enough for the role of Mark...except for the fact that he's totally thinning on top. It's one of those things you don't notice if you're sitting down in the nice seats, but if you're up in the balcony, looking down at the action...well, you notice. But he's so much fun on the stage. This is the second time I've seen him live (I saw him a few years ago with Seanie in Little Shop of Horrors. He makes an excellent Seymour.)

Adam Pascal, on the other hand...well, to be honest it seemed like he was phoning in the performance half the time. I dunno, he just didn't bring the same energy that the rest of the cast seemed to be crackling with. Maybe he was having an off-night.

The rest of the cast were great. The actress playing Maureen, Nicolette Hart, sounded just like Idina Menzel when she was speaking; it was almost freaky. When she was singing, though, she had her own unique voice, and she just did a fantastic job. Really stood out in my memory.

It makes me really want to see the show again. I love it. I wonder if it'd be worth the time to go wait in line for the $20 front row tickets...

Side grumble to self: I always misspell 'Coppelia' as 'Copellia' and it drives me nuts.


Like Swan Lake, Giselle and La Sylphide, Coppelia is one of the great classics that is a standard in every ballet troupe's repertoire. Ballet San Jose has trotted it out several times in my lifetime, most recently in 2004, I think, and it has become one of my favorites.

In a small peasant village, Doctor Coppelius works day and night on creating automaton dolls, striving to create a perfect human replica. His latest creation, a doll called Coppelia,is so beautiful and lifelike that when he puts her out on the balcony to 'read' in the bright sun, the town's most eligible bachelor, Franz Schmeterlink, tries to flirt with the lovely maiden. Naturally, his current love Swanhilda is less than pleased and the entire first act has the two of them fighting in the middle of the village square, right in the middle of a harvest festival. As the day draws to a close, and Swanhilda catches Franz looking at Coppelia one final time, she and her friends decide to sneak into Doctor Coppelius' workshop so Swanhilda can tell her rival to leave her man alone.

The workshop is dark, but the girls soon discover Coppelia's secret, and burst into giggles. They wind up the other dolls, and soon knights, clowns, and exotic foreigners are jumping and dancing around the room. But as the girls are exploring, the Doctor returns and kicks everyone out except Swanhilda, who hides in Coppelia's room. While she's hiding, Franz appears and begs the Doctor to allow him to marry Coppelia. He agrees, but tells Franz they must drink and celebrate. The 'wine' Franz drinks is laced with a sleeping potion, and soon Franz is unconscious, allowing Coppelius to draw out the boy's life essence and feed it into his doll. It seems to work, because Coppelia's movements become more and more lifelike as Doctor Coppelius 'feeds' her Franz's essence. She dances for him, but it's not Coppelia – it's Swanhilda in the doll's clothing. She helps Franz escape and makes a mess of the Doctor's lab, setting off all of his dolls and revealing the real Coppelia in a lifeless heap on the floor.

The final act is the wedding of Franz and Swanhilda, which has a ton of traditional folk dances and lovely dancing, but since I'm a very story-driven person I tend to space out a lot during this act.

The dancing in this ballet is beautiful, and often quite whimsical since this is a comic ballet. In this production, there were a couple of moments in which Franz would lean in toward Swanhilda, as if to lead her in a pas de deux, and she lifts up her leg and kicks him in the face! Pretty fun, especially since physical comedy is not at all what you usually think of as part of ballet. Ever since I was a kid, my favorite scene was always when the dolls are brought to life in Act II, and I still think that the magic of the moment is the most memorable part of the ballet.

It's really a good ballet for kids, come to think of it. I didn't see too many children in the audience, but I'm sure on the weekends there are a lot more of them running around.

So President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.
"Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said their choice could be seen as an early vote of confidence in Obama intended to build global support for his policies."

I'm sorry. Accomplishments are what we should be honoring with the Nobel Peace Prize, not intentions.* Obama has done a great many things, some of them good and some of them bad, but I honestly can't think of anything he's done that warrants the Nobel. He's improved our standing in the Muslim world, but that was not a particular merit of his Presidential policies, but the result of:
A/ He has a Muslim background, so he's more likely to understand their background
B/ He's a man of color
C/ Obama burps sparkling bubbles, farts rainbows and rides unicorns. People just love him. (EDIT TO ADD: ALSO HE POOPS GOLD.)

and perhaps the biggest contributing factor is simply
D/ HE'S NOT BUSH.

I say this as a huge Obama fan. I love the guy. But he's been in office for less than a year. When he was nominated, he was in office for like two weeks. I feel like people around the world are doing their darnest to turn Obama into a symbol for everything good and proper, but he's not the Messiah. He's not a savior or a superhero. He's just a man like any other, and at some point we're all going to have to realize that he's human and can't live up to all the expectations and desires and wishes and hopes we've piled on his shoulders.

* Although according to this article, intentions are just fine for a Peace Prize.

Today was Club Day at DeAnza. All the little student organizations and associations get a table at the center of campus and try to recruit members to their group for Christians, Atheists, Chinese, Rock Climbers, etc. Seeing the tables always bums me out a little. I'd love to join one of the groups and be able to play board games during my breaks (yes, there's an International Board Game club) or go on weekend excursions to Yosemite with the Outdoor Club, but where's my time to do this stuff? When I'm not in class, I'm eitehr studying my books or working at one of my jobs. I don't have time to see the friends I already have; is there any point to fostering new relationships I'll never be able to maintain?

Oh well. What else did I do today besides spend ten minutes wallowing in self-pity because I am antisocial? I had a midterm in Archaeology. I think I did very well. I was in and out like lightning, bam bam! 40 questions. Completed in ten minutes. That's what, fifteen seconds a question? It was an open-note exam, but I didn't even need the notebook. I cracked it open once or twice just to double-check an answer, but it was just confirmation. It was a ridiculously easy exam. Heck, I even spotted an error the teacher had made when he set up one of the questions. I rock.

My Accounting midterm from last Tuesday? That one didn't go so well. I got a 74%, which given I had missed at least four class sessions in two weeks is not bad. I mean, not awesome, but passing, which was all I expected. But the teacher grades on a curve, and our class performed so poorly she decided to add ten extra points to every exam. My score went shooting upwards 20% to a comfortable 94%. What's that, an A? Sweet! Of course, the bitch of getting an A is that you have to maintain it, but I'm happy, of course.

Next Tuesday is my next midterm, this time in Statistics. Fun!

Man, I thought I was unprepared for my Archaeology midterm. I have only read the chapters once, and hadn't really gone over my notes or made my "cheat sheets" for the exam, which is on Thursday.

The guy sitting next to me today? Hasn't even looked at the textbook yet. He had the terms from the class written in his notebook, but he didn't even know what paleoarchaeology was. Oi. You can figure that out just from the name! Yeesh.