so i’m sitting in the waiting room of the service department at mike haggerty volkswagen in oak lawn… bored out of my skull.

daytime television? ugh. am glad i brought an “Arrested Development” dvd to spend my time on, should someone move and grant me access to a chair near a power outlet so i can plug in instead of rapidly draining the battery with the dvd drive.

the past two weeks have been insanely busy. running around and working and more running around and more working. tuesday-and-wednesday was effectively one work day; i went home tuesday at sixish, futzed around for a few hours, then at midnight got ready to go back to work, where i was in by 12:45 am in order to receive a part that had been couriered to us from texas to make the wednesday maintenance window. (i won’t ask, but i must say that i’m dying to know how much it cost to do that. i mean, fedex overnight isn’t cheap to start with… and this was the “we’ll pick it up and throw it on the very next flight out and have someone drive it directly there once the cargo is unloaded” courier service. i’m sure it cost more than the part was worth.) then we did a ton of shit during maintenance, with mirafolk on site, and for a delightful change in pace, we were up when maintenance ended. actually, we even completed early, slightly before seven, and maintenance ends at eight. so that was cool. also, my pager has finally stopped paging me about every four hours for two outstanding noncritical conditions, which it had been doing for, oh, two and a half weeks. i had gotten past the “driven batshit crazy” phase and well into “completely apathetic to the sound of my pager,” letting the pages pile up until i could do a “delete all” and blow away twelve of them at a time.

in other news, i really need to come up with a vi macro that does J072lBi for me. while i’ve got the muscle memory thing down, it’s still a drag to do a lot of. however, i’ve never set up any macros so that would require reading documentation. documentation! bah! learning is hard! i disapprove.

tuesday morning around 1AMish, i woke up from this really dreadful nightmare. it was something about being trapped in a really disgusting dive bar which was infested with demons, and the phones were just making horrible “possessed by demons” screams at me every time i tried to call someone for help. it was really disturbing, and i woke up and dragged kiyoshi over so i could pet him until i was able to get the dream out of my head and go back to sleep. cats are good for that. they don’t really want to hear what the dream was or talk or anything, they’re just all about the ear scratching. sometimes selfishness is helpful.

i just got done (?) with my taxes … well, what i can do of them. i never received a 1099-INT for my checking account, so i left that off (something like $13 of undeclared income… oh well) and will just file a 1040X once i get it. have never had to do that before. it’s a little bit scary, wondering if i’m inviting an audit by not giving the IRS its 16% slice of that $13, or whatever. — happily, turbotax tells me i owe about two grand less than i expected to have to pay, which means i have to pay only about one grand. although i still suspect it of being wrong, somehow. there’s nothing quite like doing your taxes to make you feel like a hardened criminal who’s about to go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud. i *swear* i would have declared those thirteen dollars if they would have sent me the stupid form! and i really honestly will file an amended return once i get it, mainly because i’m really scared of the IRS! please don’t audit me and throw me in jail! i’m too nice for jail!

also, yesterday, on a whim, sent in my application to harold washington college, which is one of the city colleges of chicago, aka a community college. i decided, after listening to that new carla bruni CD like 18 times back to back, that i’m unhappy about losing so much of my french, so i’m going to go take some french classes. and maybe italian. taking latin made me want to learn italian — it’s all about the Rs, i think. and then i had a brief thought the other day about learning japanese, when i was pondering the eternal irregularity of the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have,’ and wondering if they’re irregular verbs in eastern languages as well. i don’t know that i would ever take japanese — russian is on the to-do list ahead of japanese — but HWC does offer it, so we’ll see what my boredom level is in a couple of years, maybe.

oh, car’s done! bye!