to review

I keep meaning to write about various things in a timely manner, but, for whatever reason, get easily distracted and suddenly a week goes by. The speed at which time is flying is terrifying. In a month tomorrow I start school. Eek!

Remember how I told you about the almost instantaneous karma thing I have? You didn't believe me. Add this to the list:
On Wednesday I was working on transferring data from one database to another. This involved copying and pasting. Pretty standard. A monkey could probably do it. Early on, around 8:30am, I copied a phone number to paste in the second database, but something happened and both databases froze up and had error messages all over them. This was bad because I'm about 1/7 of the way through the transferring, but that's still 400 groupings of information, which took about 8 hours to do (it's a slow-moving process with a lot of cutting and pasting). I tried to remain calm, but I wasn't very good at it. So I decided to leave it until my supervisor came in, got settled, maybe had some coffee. But, for whatever reason, the head librarian and my supervisor started talking almost as soon as my supervisor got in and the head librarian must have felt cornered or under attack or something because he blurted out that I destroyed the database. Uh... thanks. So the next 4 hours were spent with me being jokingly blamed for destroying this precious database that my supervisor designed while Systems tried to figure out how to fix it. They wound up getting the backup from the previous day and it was all fine from then on, but, holy shit, it was not fun for that morning. The head librarian felt bad for "outing" me, so to speak, and bought me a Toblerone.

But, on the upside of this (because that's the whole point of telling you all this dull stuff) I got a package from my friend packed full of excitement! I knew the package was coming, but it came much faster than I thought it would. And it made the day end so much nicer than it began. This is easily one of the best packages I've ever gotten, even better than some of the care packages I got while in Japan. It has loads of music, some artwork, excellent blackmail material (teen angst poetry night, here I come! haha) and a cohesive organised system (which is really the part I love the most). I'm always impressed with people who think enough of me to put care and thought into post for me. This is impressive. And makes me want to send post.

Wednesday was also great in the end because I went for dinner at Glenn & Sam's house. Fun, they are. And they like candy a great deal, which you know I love (thanks for getting me hooked, Boffa [fist shaking]). On their patio, they have a resident mouse that runs around, hoarding the foodstuffs Sam puts out to entice the neighbourhood rodents. I've mentioned they're from New Zealand; I hadn't even realised that they don't have some of the local wildlife in NZ. Skunks, raccoons, squirrels... all new and exciting. Except Sam relayed that, after going out the side gate to a holding pen-type limbo between their building and the alley, she saw there were two raccoons right in front of her and the minor terror of trying to get by them (because the door she came out of doesn't have a handle or any way to get back in. It's limbo, I told you). I came face to face with a similar situation when I left, only my rodents were skunks. Two of them. Cute, yes, but I sure didn't want to be sprayed by a skunk, let alone two. The were separated, one on either side of the path, and a little too close for me to just casually stroll by. I waited, waited, answered Glenn when he called at me, waited, called back at him, which I then realised freaked the skunks out so I tried at that point to sprint by them. Once at the gate I quicky opened the latch and got out, then called in hushed tones at Glenn that there were skunks. He got excited and peeked over his fence to see. I've seen skunks up close, but never been faced with the real possibility that, within a small confined space, they could be close enough to spray me. I wonder if there's a skunk whistle in the same way they have deer whistles...

How quaint my life is. You see? I must dodge Pepe LaPue.

Last evening I went for a bite and beer, then coffee with my French friend Fabrice. He is always trying to get me to introduce him to my friends because he wants a girlfriend. He's recently decided that, since I speak of one friend a great deal, I should call him whenever I hang out with her so he can get to know her. It's so ridiculous that it's hilarious. I no longer try to spare his feelings and, instead, guffaw directly in his face. It's just lucky that he's funny about it or I'd have to stop talking to him.

And let this be a lesson to the rest of you: I don't set up friends for dating. I am extremely bad at picking sides in fights.

Crap, I'm going to be late for work. Sorry, I didn't have time to check for spelling errors.