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#186 - Fall Faerie Layout
September 22, 2001 @ 8:32 pm

Fall is here! Yee-haw! Hence, the new layout. I hope you all like it. I'm getting sick of Verdana, hence the dabbling with Tahoma. I'm debating going full-bore and grabbing a nifty font that's not in the "Top 5" that EVERYONE owns, and then specifying a secondary, just so *I* can experience font bliss... If I do this and put up a link so everyone could grab the font I settle on, would any of you download that font just to read my diary properly? Let me know in the Guestbook. Speaking of which, I actually updated the Guestbook & the Slambook to match the new layout. Imagine that, everything matching!

Yo. Yesterday was a full day. Rumors had been flying around the office during the week, and on Wednesday three-on-one meetings between management & each salesperson were scheduled for Thursday. Followed by our first Staff Meeting in months on Friday morning at 8:30. The store doesn't even open until 9am, and my scheduled hours are never earlier than 10am. I was not a happy camper. Things being up in the air with Sweetie's job, I was a bit nervous. I decided to ask my manager if they were going to do something horribly drastic like shut down and fire eveyone Friday.

Answer: no. Yee-haw, I still have a job!

So there I am, Friday morning, waking up at 7:30 in the morning to get some food in me before I have to jaunt off to the office. I was NOT happy. I had woken up at 2am with a headache. Lots of headaches this week for some unknown weekend. But I got to the office and got to spend some time with gaypal, including a yummilicious hug. That man smells INCREDIBLE! I practically have to eat my fist to keep from licking or munching him when he's in close proximity. Damn!

The staff meeting was not fun. We had learned that one person had been "laid-off" the night before, and everyone else showed up, so I was pretty sure that no one else was/would be laid off. The staff meeting started and management told a bitter story about the horrible gossip brewing in the front retail area. Mean stuff about them buying a summer home (a pathetic cabin for $50k) when the company was so dead. The word "embezzelment" was brought up. My manager asked me later if I had been asked by anyone about the state of her & her husband's PERSONAL finances. I said no, and she told me that people had asked the other part time bookkeeper about it. I watched my manager near tears as she explained to her back-stabbing staff that they had forged this company through blood and tears over the past 10 years, investing every last penny they made into it. She worked outside the company for years to support them because her husband made no money at it. They bought their house before the market shot up, as a fixer-upper. And now that it was worth more, they had borrowed against it to buy their dinky little cabin on the lake. That's it. No embezzelment. They don't wear gold Rolexes. They don't drive a Lexus or Mercedes - they drive a 1983 Honda that has a history of being stolen.

I was sickened. The president can be amazingly rigid sometimes, but he is a good person, and his wife is a great & fair manager, a descent & sweet person. I wanted to turn around and scream at the people who had brought her to tears. Because I knew who it was. I had heard a few of the other rumors. Just not THIS one. And it was ALWAYS instigated by one person. The same person who was sent home LAST Friday and told not to come back until he decided if he still wanted to work here. That was the 2nd or 3rd time he's been told that. And he always comes back with his tail between his legs. And they always take him back. I think it's disgusting. They should have gotten rid of him years ago, but they haven't. And now this, and he's still here. The only thing I can figure is that maybe, *maybe* no one told them *he* was the instigator, just a follower. Yah, right. I was physically sick after that meeting.

I worked my 4 hours and got the fuck out of Dodge. I didn't want to be near these people anymore. I had a brilliant idea.

I drove to the road. The road lined in trees that shed their leaves early in the season. Oh, the beauty when I came up to that first intersection. Sitting still, watching the cars wiz by me, the leaves flying by like water being kicked up by tires. Yes, it was thick like puddles along the edge of the road. I opened the sunroof, rolled down the windows, turned off the radio, and sped up the hill reaching around 60 on this sharp, sharp upclimb. It was beautiful. I grinned and cried out my pleasure. Fall is definitely here. I told myself I would come this way on the way back, but I forgot. Oh well.

I went to the costume store. It's a huge warehouse. They have giant gargoyles flanking the front entrance. They breathe smoke, crane their necks back and forth, expand and collapse their wings, and emit horrible moaning sounds. And they're bigger than a man. Obviously fake, but me and everyone else couldn't take our eyes off of them. I think it was just the idea that someone would spend thousands of dollars to make it, and someone else would spend even more to buy it. I wanted to throw a huge Halloween party at a mansion just so I could set those puppies up at the front of the house!

I settled for wandering through the place, ending up in the stage-makeup aisle. I bought white pancake makeup and some black lipstick. Pancake makeup is expensive! But something tells me I won't have any trouble getting white enough!!

Then it was over to the mall to get some food, because it was about 2pm and I hadn't eaten since 7:30am, so I was starving. I got sidetracked at Payless Shoes. They were having a sale on boots. I had been meaning to stop in to replace my clogs that are falling apart, since I suddenly don't have anything to wear with black skirts anymore. I could not find anything suitable, so settled on a pair of boots that I think would look good with a long skirt. We'll see...

Umm... After that I came home, ate, read my book (go Anita!), and took a nap. Should not have taken the nap, because it sucked all the intelligent thought from me. Hence no entry again yesterday. That night we grabbed a pizza and rented "Blow".

"Blow" was not what I was expecting. I figured it had a 50/50 chance of ending bad. You know right off the bat that it ends bad, because he narrates the opening scene by naming himself as "prisoner #xxx". Yah, it had to end bad from that statement. Anyway, the movie was deeper, and more emotionally powerful than I had expected. I wanted to see it because Johnny Depp is luscious, and with blonde hair and his cheek bones, he lookes a HELL of a lot like my ex-coworker that I had the monstrous crush on. Oddly, he didn't look that sexy anywhere in the movie. Huh. But the movie was pretty good. I cried. I totally wasn't expecting that. And then they remind you at the end that it's based on a true story. And you want to cry some more. Because it's a sad way to end a life. Yep, they tug at those heart-strings something fierce. Be warned!

Sooo, today's Saturday. As you can see, I spent all day working on the new layout. I really like it. We just got back from seeing a matinee of "Jeepers Creepers". Holy shit, DON'T SEE THAT FUCKING MOVIE! We had a furious debate as to whether it was the worst movie we had ever seen. It was just horrible. What little, teeny-tiny plot you could try to discern made absolutely NO SENSE. Bleck. It was BAD.

Anyway, we're now waiting for dinner to arrive. Found a place that delivers Indian food! Woo-hoo! Now, we still haven't found a place that serves Indian food that we LIKE since the expensive place in Edmonds, but we're gonna try them all out one by one until we find one we do like!!

Hopefully, I'll write some more this weekend, and get to being regular again. This last week was very... I felt like I wasn't myself. Like I spent so much time trying not to have any horrible emotions, that I ended up not having any at all. That's almost worse. I wonder if we're ever going to be the same after what's happened. I hope so. More cautious, sure. Of course. But comfortable in our own neighborhoods, our own haunts, our own homes, our own skin. That's what I want again. I hope it happens soon.

PS: go check out this cool site I found, Ninjai the Little Ninja. It's a Flash animated movie broken up into chapters. So far they're up to 5 chapters, and hopefully they'll start posting the 2nd Act soon. It's pretty cool.

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