New Job

As most of you have prolly heard, I got a new job at the Tax Commission .... so I "officially" moved on Tuesday and got started on my new job today ... funny thing is my "new" job was created so they could get rid of my old unit, so as training for my new job I will basically be doing my old job and slowly taking on new tasks (and getting paid almost twice as much)... I was excited about my new job cause I thought I would have less time on the phone but as it turns out for a while at least I'll probably be answering more phone calls, because the other people in my old unit will be leaving before the people that were hired in the new positions are trained on the phones... oh well at least the days will go fast because I'll be busy.

Halloween (or the post that I meant to post on Halloween but thought I accidentally erased)

Remember when you were a kid Halloween was like this HUGE holiday, and when you got done trick-or-treating you were sure it had to be midnight cause you walked forever and went to every house? Yeah it's kinda funny to realize that when you were a kid Halloween probably ended at 8 p.m. and you didn't really go to that many houses. Just a random thought.

ANYway so this Halloween I was reminded why I don't watch scary movies that often, it is 2 a.m. and I am wide AWAKE. We watched Stay Alive and White Noise tonight and while they didn't have the most unpredictable plots, they certainly made me jump. I think my friends spent more time watching my reactions than actually watching the movies. I got home to find my family forgot that I was still out so all lights were off and doors locked; finding your house key while standing on a deserted street in the dark isn't much fun, but at least I gave the people inside as much of a fright becuase they thought someone was breaking in.

New Room

My room has lights!!! yea!! so who knew that picking out new lighting involved so much drama ... I chose what I thought were pretty simple lights at Home Depot, turns out switching lights from florescent overheads to regular lights takes a bit more work than normal especially if the ceiling also needs to be reinforced to accommodate a fan. oh well it done now and I love it ... I don't have a door yet, but one thing at a time.

Books

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Star the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK 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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR 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
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* (loved it!!)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
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
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
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
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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* (abridged)
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
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
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 (started, but boring)
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* (abridged?)

Memory Tag

Okay Friends. I don't usually do these...but I had to give in.

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you.

Hair

My hair is so boring that I have decided to splurdge on a nice haircut and style. So any suggestion for how I 'should change it ? Chop it off?, Dye it red. any and all suggestions are welcome.

Oops

I totally stink at blogging-- so I am borrowin a funny story from my sister. My sister has been texting this guy Jacob in her pharmacy class all semester long, then when she talks to him in person it's like completely weird because he ignores her questions. So Yesterday she sends and e-mail from her phone and signs it with her name. A little while later she gets a text message saying hey Niki this is Erik I was wondering who had been texting me all semseter. She had been texting the WRONG person the whole semseter. I laughed so hard when she ended her story by saying "So many things made mch more sense after finding out it was Erik"

God;s secret angels

Don't you love it when someone outreaches your expectations ? There is a lady at my work and she always has something negative to say about everyone... so I try to be nice to her but I also try to limit the time I have to talk to her, but the other day she overheard me say I was nervous about an interview I was going to and she told me not to worry and just be my normally happy self.... She made my day and gave me so much confidence going into the interview. The weird part is that I had avoided saying anything around her because she had just been complaining about how she had applied and hadn't gotten an interview. She was the perfect person to give me confidence because I rarely hear her say anything nice about anyone so I believed her when she said I would do great. I am not avoiding her so much now and I hope she interviews for a job soon so I can wish her luck and return the favor.

Thank goodness, it was just an earthquake.

so my job at the Tax Commission has been going pretty well. It is pretty mindless work so I get to listen to books and music all day... which I like but will eventually get bored of. On Thursday I even got there early so I could leave at 2:30pm. Getting up early involved a bit of a change in routine, so at about 7:30am when my computer screen looked like it was moving I started taking deep breaths and telling myself that I was fine and if I needed to get up and take a break I could. I blinked a couple of times and relaxed my shoulders. I then opened my eyes and noticed the cord for my earphones was swinging quite a bit and heard a couple of people asking if they felt that. Needless to say I was relieved that my coworkers did not see me having an anxiety attack (which usually involves puking), but I quickly moved onto being afraid that I was going to be crushed to death in an earthquake because my cubicle wouldn't provide enough protection. Don't worry though everything turned out all right and I am obviously still alive.

Clifford the little red truck

My dad has been trying to get me to drive a manual transmission for the last six years. He made the mistake of trying to teach me in his Toyota, which had a tricky clutch, and I was too freaked out by stalling every ten seconds to want to continue trying, so I only occasionally gave in to a lesson and drove around the neighborhood. On Monday however I walked out my front door and was confronted with the fact that the only cars left at my house were the two trucks (both are stick shifts) and if I wanted to get to the library ( the library is the most relaxing, comfortable place in the world) I would have to pass through numerous stop lights while operating a manual transmission. I made to the library and back without stalling once, although I'm sure if anyone saw me they thought I was crazy because I screamed every time I shifted gears without mishap. I was even able to find the lights in my moms truck and didn't forget to turn them off when I got home. Yeah for me!!!