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[magedragonfire]

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Tauren Shaman

Tauren, the not-very-gentle giants of the Horde, stand out above the rest. Pastoral at heart, they may feel the need to defend their fields - or their honour, if someone were to insult their fuzzy, glossy coat. As a shaman, you are pretty well-balanced - if not a little bit strange. Others may consider you oddly spiritual - but that's because they don't yet understand totems. But they will... and then they'll be sorry...

Find out your real-life WoW race and class at QuizGalaxy.com

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Moooooo!

Anyways.

Third day into the job. It's not terrible, but it is pretty monotonous/boring. First day we typed - entering names and addresses and dates into an old DOS system. Second day we proofread the stuff we typed the first day. I got saddled with a giant package of 260+ new cards near the end of the day, which carried over to today. Took me four hours, all told, to get through it. My brain shut off right before our first break - it was getting very, very hard to concentrate, and I was near falling asleep. The breaks are thankfully scheduled right where they need to be.
There's three other ladies who were hired to do the entry work. They're all about the age of my mom - well, two of them are probably younger (and have kids my age), but. They all seem friendly enough, but... Well, all of our breaks are scheduled together, even though I start an hour later than them (as transportation would otherwise be impossible once Mom gets back), and sitting around in the break room can get... a little awkward. They chat among themselves and stuff, and talk to me, too, but there's that whole generational gap thing going on, and... XD Oh well. I didn't expect much else.
Because I am the youngest, and the most computer-savvy, I am predictably the most efficient. I thus get done my stuff faster... And so far have been assigned three extra tasks to do, one permanently, one to do this week (it rotates between all of us, although it figures I got picked first), and one incredibly irritating task of resorting a stack of cards (because I had already filled half of the day's total quota) that I will hopefully not have to do again.
Everyone except the head bossguy is female, even the gals working on the presses. The lone washroom is thus designated as 'girls'. XD There is a small dog (bossdude's pet) which inhabits the office - I have no idea what she is, but she likes to get underfoot - and giant spiders, of which I have only seen one, but still. GIANT SPIDERS. I hope no-one minds ear-piercing shrieks if I see another one. The first one I saw scuttle across the floor near the wall at the other end of a room during a meeting yesterday, so I managed to restrain myself, but if they get any closer...
What was interesting at the meeting was that - besides getting the pep talk and getting the schpiel about how the company's so awesome and stuff - was that people were apparently interviewed and hired based off of a point system; the gal who got our resumes would go through, put a number out of 10 on them, and do things based off of that. Apparently, they generally get a couple of eights, some sevens, maybe some sixes, and hire out of that (lot of low numbers too, but XD). Tens are pretty rare.
Me? Ten. The other ladies were all 9.5ers. I can't believe he told us that - just the fact that he singled me out was enough to maybe make me think that he wasn't bullshitting. I mean, why else would you imply that someone you hired was 'better' , even if only marginally, than the other new employees, to that entire group of employees? It was kinda neat, anyways.
So anyways. I'll stick with this for the next few months. They've said that employment will be available in the new year, as well - the program they use is getting updated to Windows-whatever, rather than DOS, and apparently it would be cheaper to hire people to re-enter all of the old information into the new system than write something to transfer the data over. XD They've extended the offer to all of us already, so if I end up wanting/needing more money and haven't figured out what I'm doing with school yet, I could always do that during the spring semester.
But we'll see on that.

On to other news!

Daelin died. T.T Fish-Daelin, anyways. He definitely had ich, but the medicine that I got for him seemed to be doing the trick... I either ended up cooking him when I raised the temperature of his water to make the buggies become free-swimming, or he had something else that was wrong with him, too. Who knows. He lived a good, uh, week in my care. Exactly.
I've got a new finny pal, though, Berenth-the-betta (a new tank as well; the old one was much too small). Berenth's a crown-tail, and quite pretty! He's very... rainbowish. His head's a flesh-colour, his body red that eventually gets washed over with steel blue and turns a sort of violet, and then more towards his tail he gets actually steel blue. His fins are all nice and spiky, his tail is a double-ray, and the patterning on them seems to be butterflyish, blue bands that turn into red bands close to his body, and white further out.
Colourful!
He's also very energetic and swishy, and is quite adorable when he dives in and out of his tank's plant leaves.
Also very aggressive. He flares most excellently, gills puff out and everything, and his beard is very big. XD He does it often, too - the light on his tank, when I turn it on, makes the surface of the glass rather reflective.
...Actually, he's flaring right now at his own dimly reflected image, and I don't even have the light on. Very very aggressive. XD

The house is finally clean, after a period of Sean making a mess and not doing anything about it. Apparently, after dad came over yesterday, he was motivated to clean the mess up. >.> And to think! When I asked him, politely enough, a few days ago whether he was going to clean it, he screamed at me that I wasn't doing anything! Nope! I certainly haven't been watering the plants or feeding the cat or cleaning her litterbox, and when he was camping, I never even thought about sweeping, or cleaning the downstairs toilet, or doing load upon load of towels, or cleaning the upstairs sink and tub, or doing the mounds of dishes, or...!
Fucking good-for-nothing jackass.
And then tonight, he had the nerve to say he was having a party Friday night, because 'he hadn't had one yet', and of course, Mom can't go away for two nights without him having a party. No. Nonono. I do not want to have to put up with the drunken and stoned teenagers and the COLOSSAL mess they will create.
So I told him I would prefer he did not, and waggled my eyebrows a bit.
Response: "Are you going to be a bitch about it? Because if you are, then I'll call it off." In that vaguely threatening tone. He really does scare me when he gets like that.
"Define bitch."
"You know what I mean."
"Defiiiiine bitch."
"You know! How you're acting like right now!"
"Acting like what right now? Concerned that because, if something goes wrong, it will be pinned on my shoulders? If that's bitchy, then yes."
"Fine."
"Good."

So, hopefully, there will be no party.

And finally, I read Mercedes Lackey's newest Elemental Masters book yesterday, The Wizard of London. It's a bit of a departure - since she already did a book for each of the elements, she decided to do one on people who aren't magicians, but who have mind-talents. Variations on psychics, telepaths, mediums, psychokinesists, et cetera.
It's... odd. Engaging enough, I guess, but odd. It starts out with one character, and then shifts focus to another rather abruptly, even though the first character hangs around, and sometimes goes off on tangents to the titular Wizard of London, and so on. Some of it seems as it was written as a series of short stories, rather than a novel, and there seem to be a few scenes that serve virtually no purpose, or that are just put in there for the hell of it and really aren't even interesting.
The worst thing about the book was the climax and winding-down. She's always had a problem with this, but it's become very pronounced in her last couple of novels, I've found.
Lackey's writing, I figure, can best be compared to your typical man who thinks he's a stud, but has really no clue what he's doing. There's a little bit of fumbling around in the beginning, before starts a rather long and arduous build-up. Just when you think he's getting somewhere, he does something silly, and the whole process has to start all over again. By the end of things, you're getting pretty sick of it, but you're so far along already - why not at least attempt to get a little bit of satisfaction out of it? Alas, this is not to be had, for when the man finally climaxes (a very confusing and brief process), he immediately withdraws, maybe grunts, and then rolls over and goes to sleep.
Seriously. That's what it's like. A whole bunch of pages that build up very, very slowly and then set you down again where you started. When the climax gets to coming around - you can see it coming for miles away, by the way, but nothing will make it hurry up and get there - it happens so fast you almost don't know that it's over. Usually they're confusing, in the delivery - she has a problem writing scenes of high action/suspense, as of late, and they are really quite brief. No long, even half-drawn-out battles for her (anymore; Firebird was pretty well-executed in that regard, as were a couple of the Valdemar novels).
And then, after the evil character(s) is vanquished, you get no winding-down time. An epilogue, perhaps, but nothing that stimulates the imagination to any depths. The Wizard of London had less than two pages after the evil sorceress was destroyed by her own manipulations. Totally unsatisfying.

...Sigh. Why do I keep reading writers that were once half-decent but are turning to crap?

I think that's enough rambly for now, though.

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TEN FOREVER!