.: This Girl's Daybreak :.

I swear, I'm about to start tearing my hair out, here.

Okay, so I said before that I'm looking for a new laptop. Well, apparently most of the laptop manufacturers suck, because I can't seem to find a single device that has everything that I want. I keep finding devices that look good, and I get excited, thinking maybe I've finally found it...but no, it's missing one thing that I need. And not always the same thing! But always something. I want to scream.

( This got long... )

...And I could probably go on, but I should really stop now. I'm just really frustrated right now. =/

Well, I finally got my car back from the mechanics today!

And good lord, it sure took them long enough, huh? Looking back at my old entries, it went into the shop around 11/19. Today is 1/9. That's roughly seven weeks. Almost two whole freaking months. Although, to be fair, most of the blame lies on my dippy insurance company. They took damn near a month to even approve the claim. And they never said why. Mom and Dad thought that maybe they were debating whether to total my car; maybe the damage was near the worth of the car. Or maybe it just fell through the cracks, and got neglected. We don't know. (My bet is someone messed up. If they'd had a valid reason, surely someone would have said something.) But it took them way too long to do it, either way. And then, there was the repair time, which I knew would take a while.

But! As annoyed as I am that it took this long, I'm just happy to have my car back. <3 Now it'll just take a few days to readjust. XD I'd actually gotten used to the rental, so now I have to get used to my car again. That shouldn't be hard, though.

I mentioned before that I'd gotten an update for my desktop for Christmas/my birthday. Part of that upgrade is a copy of Windows 10. That's a pretty big change from the Windows XP I was running before.

( Just some thoughts )

I think that's it, so far. I'm still playing around, figuring things out. I may have more thoughts, later.

Take a look at that timestamp. A little after 5:00AM. Guess where I am! >_>

Second verse, same as the first! It's just the same as the last two times. When I tested it toward the end of my shift, I found that the information for Saturday wasn't in the handheld. So, I start calling people. First I call E, my boss. No answer, so I leave a message. Then I try CJ. No answer, left a message. Next, CL. No answer, left a message. Same with M. I tried them all again. Nothing. I try calling J; I didn't think he could fix this, but I had to try. He actually answered on the first call, bless him. But I was right; he didn't know how to fix it.

So I keep cycling through E, CJ, CL, and M. M answers after a while, but he didn't know how to fix it, either. So I keep calling the other three. Again. And again. And again. This goes on for an hour or so. I even try calling N, who's my boss's boss. No answer. I keep trying everyone. I text N, telling him what's up, since I couldn't get his voicemail when I called.

A little while later, N calls me. He got my text is on the way in. Huzzah.

So, N comes in and we try to figure out what's going on. But neither of us can really pinpoint anything. So, he suggests that I run through my processes again. Okay, fine by me. So I rerun everything. Once it's done, we check the handhelds and thankfully, the data seems to be showing up now. Hurray.

This particular problem happens from time to time, so I'm a little used to it. But honestly, I'm getting really pissed about the fact that almost no one in my freaking department will answer their bloody phones after hours. I mean, I get it. It sucks to get a call in the middle of the night, when you're trying to sleep. It's not fun. But, fuck. You're supposed to be on-call, in the event of technical problems like this. That means it's your freaking job to keep your phone where you can hear it, and to actually get up if it rings! Ugh.

I emailed my boss, telling him what happened. And I asked him for permission to try some fixes myself, in the event that I can't reach anyone the next time this happens. (Such as rerunning my processes, like we did tonight.) Because I can't just leave it, if I can't get ahold of someone. It has to get fixed. So, if no one will answer their freaking phones, then I need to have at least one option to try and fix it myself. We'll see what he says.

...And my last thing just finished up, so I am out of here. I think I'll stop for breakfast on the way home~

Ugh. Somebody in my company really fails at communicating things clearly.

Okay, so you all know how my company handles holidays, right? I've talked about it lots of times. When there's a holiday during the week, we get that day off, and work the Saturday of the previous week. Simple enough.

This year, both Christmas and New Year's fall on a Sunday. I figured this could go one of two ways. Either we'd just work like normal, or we'd observe the holiday on a weekday (usually Monday). A couple of weeks ago, they sent out a memo saying that we'd be observing the holiday on Monday, the 26th. This is what I somewhat expected. So, that means that we'll work on the Saturday before, and have that Monday off, right?

...Well, apparently not. >_>

I was running my processes today, using the 24th as the next working day. Shortly after I finish, I get a call from one of our dispatchers, S. She asks if I used Saturday's date, and I told her yes. She then tells me that we're not working on Saturday, but on Monday instead. So I tell her that I'd heard differently, and that I wanted to call my boss and clarify. So I call him, and get his voicemail. After a little while, S says that she thinks P would know, so I try calling her. She answers right away, thankfully, so I ask her what's up. Apparently we're going to not work on Saturday, and the people who normally would work a Saturday, will work on Monday. I guess everyone else gets it off.

And I have no idea how they're going to pay us for this. Normally, if I worked a Saturday, I'd get overtime. But this being on a Monday, it won't put me over forty hours for the week. So I won't get overtime. We also usually get holiday pay for the actual day of the holiday, but since we're working, I don't know how they'll handle it. Will we just get paid like a normal day? Will we get that, plus holiday pay? No idea. I emailed my boss, hopefully he can answer me on Monday. Or, Tuesday, now that I think of it. He probably won't be in on Monday.

I'm honestly a little ticked off about this. First, I'm annoyed that they didn't give clear instructions for how we'd be working. This is a deviation from the normal procedure, so they really needed to explain it better. And I'm ticked that I won't be getting overtime. I always like getting extra money, but especially at this time of year. I just hope they give us something extra for working that day. Guess I'll have to wait and see.

Well, one thing I wanted to do while I'm on vacation is to try my hand at baking a bit. I'm trying to learn to cook, and I thought that baking would be easier for me. I'm not completely inept; I've made cakes from a mix before, and cookies once. But still, I wanted to try a bit more. Plus, it's coming up on Christmas, and we always bake a lot for the holidays.

My first attempt was actually a new recipe. I've always liked spice cookies, but we don't make them often. One reason for that is that the recipes we have for gingersnaps/gingerbread all set up hard and crunchy, and I think we all prefer softer cookies. So, off to Google I went. I found a recipe for soft gingersnaps, and Mom agreed that it sounded good, so we tried it out. And it came out really well. Very tasty, and the cookies stayed soft. I'm kind of excited about it, so I wanted to post the recipe.

( Soft gingersnaps )

I definitely think I'll be making this one again in the future. They were super easy, and really yummy. <3

Well, the end of the semester is upon us. As always, I'll be glad to be done. I'm ready for a break!

Things are actually slightly less stressful this time around. Out of four classes, only two have finals. My writing class doesn't do tests, so all I have to do there is turn in a final portfolio assignment. It's written, all that's left is to revise it. If I even do; as per usual, the feedback from my classmates wasn't useful. Just several 'good job' type comments. Which, I mean, I hope I did do a good job, but it doesn't tell me anything to change, y'know? So I may just hand it in as-is. Haven't decided yet.

My Econ class just didn't have a final; the last test was the last thing, and it was just a regular unit test. I've already taken it, so I'm done with this one. <3

The two that do have finals, my Finance class and my Business Law class, both don't unlock until Saturday. So, I'll probably take those on Monday. I don't like taking tests on the weekend, if I can help it. I kinda wish I could just do it now, and get it over with. Granted, it's not that much longer, but still. Hell, maybe I wlll take them over the weekend. Just to be done, you know? Eh, we'll see.

Besides taking my finals, I've also got to train M next week. He's the one who's been elected to cover my shifts when I'm out, and I need to show him the ropes. Granted, it's nothing hard, and I'm sure he'll manage just fine. Still, it's always best to have them come in for a couple of nights and go over everything, just to be safe. And it has to be now, because I'm taking my vacation on the following week. Really looking forward to that. <3 It's always nice to have time off.

Let's see, what else...Oh, Christmas shopping. I still need to finish up. I am such a procrastinator. =P Every year, I tell myself I'll start early, but I never seem to manage it. Ugh. I have everything for Rich. I'm almost done for Mom; I still need to order one more thing, and then another thing I ordered isn't here yet. And I haven't even started on Dad yet. ^^;; I do have ideas, I just haven't gotten off my lazy butt to order them yet. I need to do that soon. Plus, I need to make up a list to give to Mom of gift ideas for me. I'll be checking out the annual RightStuf holiday sale for that, probably.

Well, my car is in the shop, now. We thought it was going to be drivable, but when Mom tried to take it out the other day, she said it started jerking and acting pretty weird. So, rather than driving it to a bunch of shops for estimates, we just took it to a local dealership. They don't sell Fords, but they can fix them. No word yet on how that'll go.

But, one bit of good news. Mom called me last night and said that she'd talked to the insurance people, and they said our policy would cover us getting a rental car to use while mine's in the shop. But we had to go to the rental place today at 11:00. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, normally. But for a couple of things. First, they said that if I wanted to drive the car, I had to go, so they could put me in the paperwork. (And no, just giving them my license wouldn't work.) So, I had to get up at 10:30 today, which is really freaking early for me. Oh, and then I had to come to work at 2:00. =P I'd hoped that I'd have time to go back to sleep for a bit before work, but it didn't work out that way. We did get to go to Cracker Barrel for breakfast, afterward, though. That was nice.

So, I'm running on maybe three hours of sleep right now. I'm probably going to fall asleep as soon as I'm horizontal. But, we got a nice car. It's a little four door Hyundai sedan. I've never driven a Hyundai before, but it handles pretty nicely. It's even got a satellite radio in it, which is awesome. It's a huge improvement on the Mustang, that's for damn sure.

So now I have this car to take to work, and Mom and Dad can have the Mustang if they want to go out in the evenings. I'm glad for that.

Ugh. I swear, I'm not real smart sometimes.

See, I have this nasty habit of napping a lot during the weekend. Now, this might not sound that bad at first, but think about it. I get up at my usual time, then end up sleeping off and on for a lot of the day. Then, finally, in the later hours, I actually wake up and feel able to be productive and stuff. But by then, I only have a few hours before I need to go to bed.

Which is where I am right now. See, I usually go to bed around 7:00AM. It's now 8:30, and I'm still not tired. I'm already up past my bedtime, and I don't know how easy it'll be to get to sleep at this point. But even if I can sleep, I'll have to get up at my usual time tomorrow, so we can do our weekly shopping trip. So, I'll be short a couple hours of sleep, and I'll be tired all day. Which will lead me to want to take a nap when I get home from shopping. Which will start this whole stupid cycle over again. And I work on Monday, so that's really not a good thing. Argh.

And I swear, this happens most weekends, it feels like. I know better. I really do! But I keep doing it. What the heck, self? =/

So this news broke a few days ago, but I'm just now sitting down to write about it. Apparently ITT Tech is shutting down. Like, completely. This is a good post at ontd_political about it. I've always heard awful things about for-profit universities. So, I guess this isn't really surprising.

But it's still a little unsettling to me, because I considered going there. Last year, I posted about how I wanted to go back to school, and how I was having trouble finding and picking an online program. ITT Tech was one of the schools I looked at. They looked impressive, and my Dad actually knows a guy who got a degree there, and he's got a good state-level job. So Mom thought they'd be a fine choice.

I just had a bad feeling, I guess. I'd read articles and comments online talking about bad practices and such. But you know how the internet is; reviews tend to skew negative, because people often won't bother to write a post if they're happy. Still. I was worried. And when I went to apply (I was going to apply to several places, then choose based on which places accepted me.), they wouldn't let you do an online application. You had to call and talk to someone. This is from a school that sells itself largely on its online degree programs. >_> I side-eyed that pretty hard. So I decided to skip it. It just didn't feel right.

I'd say I dodged a bullet. Reading about how the current students are kind of floundering, how maybe some of them can get forgiveness for their loans, but most will have to completely start their degrees over...it's just kind of scary. I distinctly remember, back when I was enrolling, wondering if I was being paranoid about the for-profit thing. Some of their technical degrees looked tempting, and I thought a technical school might teach the material better. But I was worried, so I opted for a different degree, from a public university, instead. And it's a damn good thing I did. Clearly, I was not just being paranoid!

...I guess there isn't much point to this post. I'm just a little startled, and feeling lucky, I guess.