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01/27/2007
I got a job!!
I can hardly believe this, since I've been looking for so long, but I start work on Monday! I did two interviews with this company back in late November/early December, and they've finally gotten back to me to offer me the position. About a week and a half ago I had an interview with another company, whom I'd applied to back in October, but at this point they were actually hiring for another position and I think it became obvious fairly quickly that I was probably not the sort of person they were looking for. ("I'm an engineer, not a political analyst!")
Anyway, so after spending the end of this week filling out all the required forms included with the offer (I need to find a less labour-intensive signature), today was shopping day. See, I've been a student for quite a while, and while doing my undergrad, I was a software designer/tester, so it didn't really matter all that much what I wore to work. As a result, most of my wardrobe is jeans, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. Now, I actually need to look decent. To top it all off, part of my New Year's resolution included a clothing purge which ended up purging most of my more professional clothing (didn't fit anymore, or maybe never did!).
So, today was clothes shopping day. I think I might be getting the hang of this shopping thing. Somehow though, I'm still trying to wrap my head around sizing. I actually bought a pair of size 4 pants today, and they fit nicely. This may not seem like much to jump up and down about, but considering about 2 months ago I thought I was a size 9/10, that's pretty crazy. I've lost a little weight, by accident - haven't been on a diet, I just got away from the university fast food I guess! But what's hard to believe is that clothing-wise, I'm such a small size (and same thing for shirts - I take a size small), but when I look around me at my friends, I'm somehow among the tallest so I feel much larger than the clothes sizes tell me.
Maybe I'm just really twiggy. I still can't seem to find blouses with sleeves long enough for my arms. I'd say the majority of the blouses I own are 3/4 sleeve, a great invention for people like me who can never find a full-length sleeve that fits. On the other hand, I like long sleeves better because they're warmer. We'll have to see what this company does about their office temperatures, but I know I've worked for some companies in the past where I would be dressed up as if it was January in the middle of July, just because they had the A/C cranked up so high. I wonder if they make thermal underwear with 3/4 length sleeves!!
So that's the scoop. New pants, new blouses, new winter boots, new bookbag, and my VISA bill will probably come by parcel post in a month. Oh well. I'll actually have a salary to pay the bill with! (I'm still in awe!)
19:39 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this
01/14/2007
I have the Power
I've been helping a couple of my friends renovate a house they just bought. Yesterday, we were working on tearing out the floor in one room and the ceiling in another. I got to use... (drumroll)... power tools! Now for anyone who knows me, and knows how much of a klutz I can be, this can be a scary concept, but I actually did OK. I was able to use a drill, no problem, and even using the reciprocating saw went off with almost no hitch. (I saw almost because I did have plaster dust in my eyes for a while after... even with glasses!) That was all pretty cool though. Now I feel like I can do anything.
Tearing up the floor was interesting, seeing the sort of flooring they used to have in this house. They laid carpet right over the old floor, which was a wood veneer floor with some coloured rectangles painted onto it. It looks to be from the 50s or 60s, and kind of like something you might find in a bowling alley or disco club. Taking that stuff off was easy in some places, coming off in large sections, and hard in other places, not coming off at all! There's a tar backing on the stuff, and in some places it looks like animals peed on it, which seems to have had the effect of dissolving the tar and bonding it like crazy glue to the plywood below.
Anyway, it's pretty interesting. The ceiling in the other room (which is where the reciprocating saw came to be used) is almost down, exposing the second ceiling above it.
All in all, this is going to be quite the renovation. I've been shopping for chandeliers and gas fireplaces with them so far, but we didn't come back from those trips with anything but a Tinkerbell desk lamp. Now let's just hope their baby is a girl!
14:24 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this
01/04/2007
End-of-Season Sale shopping sucks!
Today I decided to venture out to the shopping malls. Being January 4, I figured it wouldn't be as busy in the malls, as Boxing Day was over a week ago and people should have gotten the frenzy out of their systems. Boy was I wrong.
I went to St. Laurent Shopping Centre here in Ottawa. I don't go there very often because there's another mall closer to where I live, but this one had a place selling calendars and day planners last year, and I bought a really cool dayplanner. Also they have a Sears, and since I was looking for boots I thought that might be a good place to look. Anyway, I was at St. Laurent for all of about 2 minutes before some idiot runs over my heels with one of those kiddie push-carts - they're kind of like strollers, except they look like little plastic go-karts that the kids sit in and the parents push with a handle, like an overgrown lawnmower. Well, he tried to mow my heels with the stupid thing, not once, but twice, and didn't even bother to apologize, as if it was my fault my heels were in his way. Hello? When did civility become outdated? Anyway, I'd be willing to bet money he also drives an SUV and is one of those annoying people who drive up to within inches of your bumper if you happen to be doing anything remotely resembling the speed limit. Good riddance.
So, let's say I wasn't in such a great mood, but I decided to try shopping anyway, since I'd already invested $3.80 in bus tickets to make the trip. Most of the stores looked like they'd been hit by a hurricane, and trying to find clothing in there was basically like a trip to Frenchy's - the Atlantic Canada chain of thrift shops where everything is arranged by category in bins and it's up to you to search through it all.
Out of this whirlwind I tried to do some wardrobe shopping and came out with... (drumroll)... a pair of pants. Yes, that's it. No calendar, no day planner (that place wasn't there this year, bummer...). No sweatshirt. Though actually on the way home I stopped at that other shopping mall I was talking about and managed to find a nice toque to replace the one I somehow lost around Christmastime.
Not that it really matters much, as it went up to nearly 10 degrees (Celsius) today! Holy smokes! It feels like April, not January. It's so weird. Part of me just wishes I was in Yellowknife or something so that it actually feels like winter!
19:15 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
01/03/2007
Cleaning woes
Well, I never thought I'd say this, but the other day, just before the guests arrived for our big Christmas dinner, I think I was a little overzealous with the cleaning. I was cleaning the bathroom before the guests arrived on the 27th, and afterwards decided that all the rags in the cleaning basket were so dirty that wiping anything with them probably made things dirtier rather than cleaner. So, I put the whole lot of rags (about 3 or 4 of them) in the laundry hamper, thinking that when they come out, they'll be sparkly clean and much more useful for cleaning things.
Well, they've come out sparkly clean alright, but now my nice warm Carleton sweatshirt has big greasy stains on it that are permanent. It took us a while to figure out how it happened, but it turns out the sweatshirt and the rags were touching in the hamper, and some furniture polish from one of the rags ended up soaking into the sweatshirt. Nobody noticed (and I didn't think of anything like that when I put the rags in the hamper), so my sweatshirt got washed. Now the stain is permanent. D'oh! I really liked that sweatshirt and now it's ruined. :-( At least the good news is that while the rag thing was my fault, at least it seems to only have affected my clothing and not anyone else's. Still, it sucks. Now I'm down to two operable sweatshirts. Combined with my closet clean-out earlier, looks like it's about time I went shopping again! I'm thinking of going tomorrow - hopefully the sales will still be on.
20:31 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this