A Very Quick Update

This is for those people who are breathlessly awaiting an update on my terribly exciting life. HA! In all seriousness, I have been neglecting this blog for a few weeks, and I want to let you all know what’s been going on with me and update you on certain issues, such as…

MY BACK

Well, I went to see a neurologist and spine specialist last week on the advice of my primary doctor. He examined me thoroughly and determined that the pain I’m dealing with now is no more than a bad muscle strain…and NOT because of my scoliosis. The specialist said that my scoliosis should not be causing me this much pain. He recommends that I use massage therapy, as well as ice and heat therapy, to heal the muscles. He also wants me to pay attention to the tension in my shoulders and gave me some information about relaxation techiniques. He’s concerned about my depression, too, but I’m hoping that with school coming up (which I’m absurdly looking forward to) and with a lessening of the pain in my back, which has already started, I can bring my emotional health under control.

OUR AWFUL APARTMENT

All my readers know that I hate our neighbors. I can’t even stand to see them, after listening to their demonic child run amok in their house, vibrating walls we don’t even share with them. Well, we won’t have to deal with them for much longer! After looking for a new place for the last year, my boyfriend and I finally found a new place! It’s very far away from here, about an hour and a half to the south, in Gig Harbor, just across the Narrows from Tacoma. It’s a 2 bedroom duplex with a large one bedroom garage…my boyfriend finally gets a garage! The place is surrounded by trees and bushes, making it extremely private, and it’s on a quiet street. It’s also been remodeled, with new windows, carpet, paint, and even a new dishwasher. We’ve seen it twice and met with the owners, a couple from Tacoma. We hit it off right away, and they’re being very flexible about the move-in. Our rent is staying the same…well, we’ll actually be paying less since the rent here is being increased as of this next month.

SCHOOL

I just completed my Junior Writing Portfolio today; I had to take this awful timed writing exam. I had to write one argumentative essay and one descriptive essay, all within an hour and 45 minutes. Once the university receives it, they’ll lift my registration hold and I can register for my fall classes. I’m going to have to contact my advisor, though…they’ve changed the rules for my program, and instead of being able to minor in Political Science, it looks like I’m going to have to switch to History, which is considered to be a Humanities. It’s a little disappointing, but I can still take political science courses for my electives. I’m trying to figure out how many more credits I still need to graduate, but it’s hard to say. I can’t really tell how many credits were transferred from my community college. It’s all so confusing!

Well, that’s about all that’s going on in my life right now. Not very exciting, I’m afraid!

Bohemian Reading Challenge: Another Update

So, it’s been a bit since I’ve finished Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, and obviously, I haven’t written a review yet. When it came to it, I just couldn’t put my impression into words! To put it simply, I was fairly well awed by this book. Enough said!

So, so far for this challenge I’ve read three books:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau
La Vagabonde by Colette

All my reviews thus far can be found on Crescent Moon Book Reviews. Currently, I’m re-reading Emma for the forum’s Jane Austen Book Group, but I’m almost done. I should finish in the next few days, so starting either this weekend or early next week, I should be starting On the Road by Jack Kerouac. My boyfriend read this a few years ago and hated it – he felt that Kerouac was ripping off Ernest Hemingway, who, in his opinion, is a much better writer. I’m excited to forum my own opinion. I hope that others will join me, and if you do, please leave a comment here and let me know how you’re getting on and what you think of the book!!

The Worst Day Ever

I had a horrible day at work today. My back was in agony after working yesterday, and I was in no mood for any silliness, but I got chewed out by a guy at our corporate office because I sent him and our general manager an e-mail asking them to clarify a detail in the return policy, which another associate had screwed up on yesterday. The guy called me and chewed me out, making the mistake my problem and told me I had to fix it today.

Basically, a customer was given too much money back for a return, and this guy (let’s call him N) wanted to get our $12.80 back. He e-mailed us some absurdly complicated and unintelligible instructions. After calling my manager and thinking about the problem, I decided we should do something else. Basically, N wanted the charge the customer (who was not there and has no idea there’s a problem) another $50 on her credit card…without her authorization and without her even knowing about it! I think that’s actually illegal, but whatever. He then wanted to give her some strange amount as a refund…honestly, it didn’t work out correctly, and I thought maybe he had smoked too much crack. I e-mailed N my plan, and we waited to hear back from him for hours. I did the simple price adjustment and charged her credit card for only the $12.80, instead of doing the elaborate procedure he wanted. I thought everything was fine, until he called me about an hour before closing time saying he just got my e-mail and insisted that I do it the way he wanted, because it was the “only correct way”. This guy doesn’t understand one thing about retail. I got so mad, I wanted to quite on the spot and tell him to go fuck himself. Instead, I called my manager, who told me to call the General Manager at corporate, where I finally got an answer I wanted. The GM, “J”, told me to leave it for my manager to deal with, that N should never have bothered me with the issue (especially on a weekend), and that she was very sorry. The issue is now completely not my problem, but if N ever calls me again, I may find it very hard to be polite. He’s just such a pompous idiot!!

Stolen Book Meme

I stole this book meme from Kell over at Life gets in the way. Thanks, Kell!

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (my favorite book ever!)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’m saying this counts because I’ve read most of them)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (didn’t finish it in high school, so I want to try again)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (another favorite!)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (it’s the only one I’ve read and I don’t remember it)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (LOVED it!!)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (another favorite!)
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So, that means, that out of these 100 books, I’ve read 33 and I intend to read 30 more. Who knows if I ever will, but I’m working on it!