Back to the grind

I wish that I was still at my parents'. It's just so much more lively there and there are silly laughs and tons of plants and my piano and good food. I remember crying a lot during break at work on Friday because I was writing email to Timo about what I was going to be doing on the weekend and I just couldn't help it. I can't control these things.


My parents are helping my relatives to throw a massive yard sale in Vancouver to sell off the junk (and stuff) from my late uncle's estate, so my sister and I quickly went through our childhood stuff and the junk in our house to take there to sell also.


I know that I want to be out of my job by August; it's not because of the people or anything, it's because it still hurts my wrists and hands - more than my sitting here at my own computer all day does, strangely enough - and this makes my movements significantly more laboured and heavy. They hurt quite a bit on the computer at my parents', too, but I think it's because the table's just not quite set up at a good height.

Restless (work update)

There hasn't been clean water in the plumbing at work since Thursday, so there's lots of extra jugs of water by the water coolers so that they have clean water to make coffee with, and bottles of hand sanitizer gel in the bathrooms. I don't like that stuff; it smells annoying.

I woke up on Friday morning in such a horrible mood that I didn't eat or drink anything until sundown, when I got to my parents. There were lots of chicken and rice at work but I had the resolve not to touch it. Surprisingly enough I was able to take the fasting quite well and didn't really feel anything. I don't know if was just the particular circumstances, or if it's a tolerance that I've developed through the last few years. It's both a product of lethargic/depressive episodes and a (circumlocutory) way of coping with the same - by keeping tabs on how hungry (or not) I am over the course of the hours, I distract myself from thinking about what's depressing me.

There was still no clean water at work today. We're more or less done *beep*ing the long answer booklets for the high school exams, and they are all in the process of being graded. So we're *beep*ing the machine-scored bubble sheets for those exams now. Most exam papers have name stickers on them for the student who wrote in that booklet, and these are usually applied by the teachers or the student him/herself at the time of writing. The stickers have the barcode that I *beep*. They're kind of really cheap laser-printed, but they should go on okay as long as you don't screw up and try to peel it off or curl the sticker, or the print all cracks off.

And most people are able to put the stickers on properly. No issues there.

Except that this year, the printer for those stickers really really sucked, and a whole lot of stickers have a sliver of the barcode cut off, so that they can't be scanned. What happens when these appear in the packets of exam papers is that we *beep* everything else that can be, and separate the screwed up ones, sending them back to the previous step in the assembly line. This is the "registration" section - the people who make up stickers for students who registered for the exams at the time of writing rather than at the beginning of the course. They have dedicated label printers and so their barcodes actually turn out properly, 100% of the time. And since a packet cannot proceed down the "assembly line" until everything in it has been *beep*ed (scanned), Registration was overwhelmed with massively massive stacks of exams requiring replacement labels and Scanning was sitting around with packets of exams - in some which more than half of the papers could not be scanned - waiting for said replacement labels.

The net result of this is that I wasn't terribly busy today but a number of other people were. Registration stayed late today to catch up with those stupid labels.

It was cooler and raining this morning and through lunch, and it was a bit cold in the office, so I wore a sweater to work, but right when I left work in the evening it was sunny and so I really really super warm in my sweater and felt like I was going to melt into a little puddle of sweat. Eeew.

Wrists hurt quite a bit on Friday, but not much today (not enough that I needed to bandage), despite them hurting significantly over the weekend also.