I haven't updated in an age. Summary:

- Tom and I took a trip last week down to North Carolina, to visit his grandma; his dad also met us down there. Was a nice relaxing getaway. I won at euchre a lot - this happens every time, and I haven't the faintest idea why. I wish Tom was able to see his family as often as I see mine...he and his dad are always so happy when they're together, two peas in a geektastic pod.

- I thought print-work at the store was slowing down, but then yesterday happened. Chad is back, but only part-part-time, he's been gone by the time I've come in so far. Which is fine, Ashley and I have the printshop pretty under control most of the time...but the store's office supplies were in pretty rough shape after several months of him being gone, so I'm psyched he's back. (It is probably quite sad how excited I am about having our wall'o'copy paper fully stocked again.)

- We have lost some people and gained some noobs at the store. I am really sad about having lost Casey and Amanda, they made work so entertaining, and are just good people. Too early to tell much about the new girls yet, and we may have a new boy turning up in the near future, which will be exciting if he's a halfway decent worker. We need someone who has no problem with ladders + heavy boxes. I can manage fairly heavy boxes, but not so much with ladders.

- Crocheting like a madwoman still, that's pretty much been the bulk of my spare time. Working on a few Christmas gifts, and the end is in sight for Tom's throw blanket! Also had a brief binge with making anklets and bracelets, which are *so* pretty, and I'm plotting some kind of spiderweb-looking anklet or bracelet or something now that Halloween season is approaching. (Yes I know retail makes things start early, but I LOVE Halloween, and it's a pretty big thing at the Paper Factory. We're still digging things out of boxes but I'm already getting excited.)

// warning: what follows is me just writing to get things out of my head, where they have been running around in circles. not something I'd put on your recommended reading list, it's just to help me. //

...and you can probably see from the recurring mentions of it that I have a hell of a hard time getting work out of my head. I always have, but it got WAY worse when I started taking on so much work in the print shop. (Note: I think I'm the only one who refers to a "print shop" at all around the store...but, honestly, we do enough business with the stuff to justify the term.) I was finally getting to the point where I was calmer about that...and now that Chad's back I'm spazzing out because I feel way more pressured to not screw things up, now that he's here to see. Which is ridiculous, because a) I really do usually know what I'm doing; b) I don't think he's even really looked at any of the print work, since he has other things to do and knows he can rely on me and Ashley; c) we've been doing it on our own for months and months. And d) I have the most understanding sympathetic amazing bosses in the world. Yes they get cranky when things get screwed up, but it doesn't last. Even then, I think I had a five-minute lecture about a door being left open at night (it was an overhead door, open two inches because the mechanism conked out; I didn't think it was an issue, given that mice already have their own routes into the basement, but I understand). And that's been it, that I can even remember, so that's all for like months and months.

Hell, I got another raise not long ago, and I'm pretty sure I'm at the top of the known Paper Factory payscale. (There was a rumor going around that one of the younger crew, who has since left, was getting $10 an hour, but we were pretty sure that was crazy talk. ...I'm not far from that now.) Obviously, I am not screwing up.

...but every day off, I make sure my phone is on and not far from me. I go in to work most days a little jittery, thinking of all the things I might have screwed up the last time I was in. I've been shoving aside a stupid pointless thing all day - it is my day off, I should not be thinking about work. But, yesterday (Thursday), Chad left a note for me and Ashley, that a frequent customer needed a bunch of posters printed up again. Three posters, ten copies of two of those printed on paper to be laminated, and five copies of all three on some other material, which he wanted some test prints done on. By Monday or Tuesday.

Now, the process for this customer: Print the posters on paper one day, and they need the full 24 hour drying time, before they are laminated, after which they should get another 24 hours, and then trimmed. Sometimes we have to cut a few corners, since she usually needs things in a rush. Also... the laminating is a big process. Chad or Bruce needs to be there to head it up, with Ashley (or sometimes another grown-up) to help. I've helped before too, but, I really don't know what I'm doing. (I'm trying to keep it that way - I really don't have a good memory for procedural things, and, honestly, I have to draw the line somewhere, because if I know how to do EVERYTHING in the store, I will try to DO all of it, and I will go even more crazy.)

The test prints he wanted... I'd never even used the material before, and it was weeeiiird stuff, so I had no clue what settings to give the printer. I considered just guessing, but... the material was just *so* different, I felt like the ink settings should be something other than our usual. I don't know. And it turned out anyway, I didn't even have time to get all of the paper posters printed - we've always run high-quality prints for this woman, and it literally took 5 hours to print out ten of these suckers.

...all of that, on a night where I had two new girls working, one semi-new person, and a second semi-new person who was coming in two hours late. I did not get much done in the basement at all, which was where I was supposed to be all night.

So I came home feeling wretched, like I'd let everyone down and they were all going to have so much more work to do tomorrow than they'd expected, and it would just make everything run so much less smoothly, and Chad would be annoyed with me and think I was an idiot for not knowing how to run those prints, and in all the confusion at the end of the night I was sure to have forgotten something...

...

...and this is why I am writing all of this out. There was absolutely no reason for me to feel awful. And there's no reason for me to have a knot in my stomach now when I think about going in tomorrow afternoon. Chad knows how long it takes things to print. Flyer understands that, when new people are around, older people can't get a whole lot done. (Flyer also understands that the kid who was supposed to be helping me move things is... a bit flaky, let's leave it at that.) Ashley was in today, and she'd have given the work a look-over, and saved anything in dire straits. If there was a crisis, she would have called me.


I did manage to relax alright most of today. My stop by the health clinic this afternoon went much more smoothly than I'd feared (as it always does). Tom went into a mild panic when I told him what the nurse had told me - the spotting I keep getting midway through the month might be a sign that my birth control isn't giving me the coverage it ought to. I tried to allay his worries by joking about it...which I did in a completely nonsensical and... well let's just say that it made no sense at all to do, and did not help, which Tom duly pointed out, and then mocked me for, which I think did, in the end, help. Anyway, I need to head back in during September for the annual joy of a pap smear, at which point they will probably change my birth control aaaagain. Hopefully it helps this time. About six months ago, they started me on the next-higher strength stuff, and it helped for I think the first month. And then the spotting was back where it was. Also, my cramps are briefer, but MUCH more intense, so I haven't decided if that's better or worse. I also need to start tracking when I have migraines, because I'm starting to think the two issues are connected.

We had lunch at Bob Evans, watched some more Babylon 5, I picked up a few groceries, made Tom the pizza casserole I've promised him all week, and, as always, washed some dishes. I reloaded my iPod with some fresh podcasts, and looked at my email for the first time since I got back from North Carolina. Which was pretty terrifying, but, I did discover that my Paper Factory buddies have been posting pictures of people on Facebook, which is entertaining. I'd forgotten Mac has one of me from last October, wearing my favorite rental costume - the pink'n'black striped polka-dotted 80s-overload foofy-sleeved dress, which claims to be a saloon girl or can-can dancer costume, I forget which because it is so blatantly neither. (On that note - I have my eye on a seriously awesome 80s dress to buy this year.) There are also copious group photos from the last Paper Factory Crew party, a Disney movie night/cookie baking + chocolate pretzel making night. Which was quite a bit of fun, and was also the last get-together with a few people before they left. sigh.

Which reminds me, I need to decide if I'm going to go out with people Sunday night - Sam turns 21, so people are going downtown to celebrate. I love hanging out with Sam, who is one of the most entertaining people ever, and PF crew are pretty entertaining in general... but I'm really not a downtown person. I've honestly never been to any of the bars in town. Also, it'll be the first real weekend all the college kids are back, and I don't know if I want to deal with that. Sam's luau, Kate's Disney night, things like that, I love.

Though, looking at the photos, even then I'm always hanging around the edges of things...just how I am I guess.


Alright, enough of the emo. I feel loads better than I did earlier. Except that now my neck hurts from hunching over the keyboard like the ill-postured idiot that I am. The iPod should be re-charged by now, time for some more crochet before bedtime. <3

Labels: crochet, navelgaze, printshop, work