Stress = bad.

Hello, loyal readers.

Sorry that I haven't updated in like...two weeks...yikes. Things got really hard up here, and I was having a very tough time dealing with it all. It's too personal to go into here, but I started having physical symptoms of the massive amounts of stress I've been dealing with, and also having little breakdowns somewhat similar to panic attacks. Stress attacks? I don't know. But I got in touch with my doctor and she called in some sedative medication for me. Thankfully I haven't had to take any, but I feel relieved that it's there if I need it.

Things are still moving along. My laptop is awesome. I took an impromptu visit home a couple weeks ago. It turned out to be not as restful as I had hoped, as I had a bunch of stuff to do (spring clothes shopping, doctor visits, haircuts, etc). It was nice to be back home, though. I noticed some differences between there and DC: Southern life is a lot slower-paced than here, people are nice everywhere, the food is a lot better, etc. DC is kinda like a crossroads between North and South to me. You can run across Southerners, but there are yankees here, too. The majority of people are yankees, I think, or Southerners who are trying to fit in with the faster pace of life and therefore can't afford to be as nice as back home.

Anyway. I got philosophical there. Sorry.

I made a schedule of the stuff I have to finish and when I'm going to work on it. I think that has helped my mental stability greatly, along with having an emergency plan in case things do start to go wrong again. Sigh. There's just so much to be done...

I felt so tired yesterday that I canceled my volunteer shift. Despite sleeping about ten hours, I still took a nap of a couple hours. Alice did too, but she got home at about 3am and woke up at about 10am, I think. She was entitled. Anyway, we went down to see the Cherry Blossom Fireworks show doodad thinger last night. We sat on the opposite side of the Tidal Basin and watched them. Very pretty, but pictures didn't come out very well. It was dusk by the time we got there. We took some pictures anyway, and since Alice's camera had a flash, her picture-taking time lasted longer than mine. I plan to steal some pictures from her whenever she posts them.

I slept a lot today, as well. But according to my sleep graph, I was up and down all night, so that explains it. Going to just take it easy today, I think. Tomorrow, I may make a trip to Union Station, where the HQ of the Cherry Blossom Festival is. Last night we couldn't find any vendors anywhere (food or merchandise) and I want to buy some stuff. Let me know if you want something!

Gonna sign off now. I desperately need to do some laundry. Bleh.

Laptop woes...and laptop yays!

Well, my friends...last Saturday, I learned that soy sauce and laptops are not friends. In fact, they really hate each other.

We were eating Chinese dumplings, since we have six bags of them and never eat them anymore. I had finished mine, and was on my laptop, which I honestly never do, have my laptop near food, I mean. So I picked up my bowl to take it into the kitchen and it slipped...and splattered the leftover soy sauce all over my open laptop.

I immediately shut it down and wiped up all that I could. Did you know that soy sauce is greasy? Upon getting back on it, it appeared that everything was okay. It had been a crappy morning (crappy week, really) so before I had a mental breakdown, I went to take a nap.

When I woke up, my trackpad was being strange, and a couple of my keys didn't work. Sleep made me feel better, but I still felt like crying because my laptop was broken. I made an appointment to take it to the Genius bar the next day.

So, Sunday, rainy rainy Sunday, I trek out to Montgomery Mall to the Apple store. The guy says that they'll have to send it out to be repaired. He won't say that I spilled something on it on the off-chance that they don't find it. If they don't, they can replace everything for free because I have the protection plan. If they find it, they could requote me up to $755 plus tax. This made my jaw drop. He also said that I could take it to a third party certified repair shop, but that seemed really daunting seeing as I have to rely on public transportation to get anywhere. I called Dad, who spoke with the guy, and decided that he would rather them send it off because it's Apple, so we know they'd do a good job. I left my baby there, knowing I wouldn't see her again for 5-7 days.

This past week was horrible. Thankfully, I have awesome roommates who lent me their computers so I could get the stuff done that I needed to on Monday. But the first deadline for getting the applications into the new database at work was Monday, and we didn't meet it. We met it barely yesterday afternoon, when I was very near to strangling myself with my mouse cord while slitting my wrists with staples and choking myself with toner. I've done about 250 of these applications over the last three weeks. I want a day off. I especially want something new to do. Hopefully I'll get that something new to do on Tuesday.

In the middle of the week, I got a call from the Apple store. They found the soy sauce, but they were only going to charge $430 to have it cleaned up, thankfully. I think that might be their ploy. They suggest an outrageous price, so that when you're confronted with a less, but still outrageous, price, you actually feel relieved and agree to pay it.

Anyway, I trudged home last night and took the shortcut, which meant that I didn't come by the front desk to check for packages. I went out today to Maxim, the Chinese supermarket, to get some more pork buns (AGAIN no Chinese spinach! RAWR!) and Japanese candy. When I came back, I noticed a slip on our mailbox that said I had a package. Two packages, actually. I went to the front desk.

A laptop-sized box came out. I was trying not to hope it was my laptop. I was actually trying to figure out what the second package was, but he said he couldn't find one and I'm not expecting another one. So I told him to call me if they ran across anything.

I came upstairs, getting increasingly giddy because what else could this be? It HAD to be my laptop! I opened the box after some struggling (what kind of devil box do they ship these things in???) and saw nothing but padding. HAD to be a laptop! I dumped the padding out and my laptop slid out with it.

AAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!

I shrieked and jumped around for a long time. I'm pretty sure Alice thinks I'm a freak.

So I have my laptop back. I missed her. I feel tons better now that I have it back, but this semester is still stressing me something awful. At least we're halfway through.

Another pretty crap day.

Well, today was not so good, as you can tell by the subject. I've tweaked my hours at work to Tues-Fri 8-5. It's tiring working that extra hour, and I have no idea why. It's not proportionately tiring. It's way more so. Odd.

Anyway, I ran out of work this morning and opened my big mouth to my supervisor about it, who told me to tell her and she would always find me something to do. I started doing the sudoku puzzle in my Express newspaper (free, daily) and she came by.

"Hi! How are you doing?"
":P I'm so bored."
"Come with me."

It scares me that she's always so efficient like that, and always has this grin like "you asked for it." The Japanese. They are an efficiently scary people.

She ended up loaning me to another department, since mine won't need me until next week. The department is Global Services. I'm not sure exactly what they do, but it involves more databases and spreadsheets. And a headache that's been going on for a while.

See, their old system was...well, old. They were moving to a new system with the apps from this year, and had all the scholars fill out the online apps directly into this new system. But now the new system is broken. So the apps have to be moved back to the old system. BY HAND. Like HAND-TYPING. That's where I come in. Because I am an intern and no one in their right mind who was getting paid for this would do it. But me? I do it for free. :D

The apps are about 24 pages long. It took me about 2 and a half hours to do four of them. I thought that was it. Nope! Global Services Manager Anneke comes by my desk that afternoon when I'm finished with the first four.

"Were you okay with the apps?"
"Oh, yeah, I was fine, no problem."
"Okay, I'm gonna give you more to do."

By "more" she meant "a helluva lot more." I got two done and was working on the third before the system hiccupped on me, I lost all the data, and only have fifteen minutes left. So instead of breaking down to cry, I left for the day. Seemed progressive at the time.

On the way home on the metro, I started feeling ill. I read about halfway, then had to put my book away and just breathe and concentrate on not throwing up on the lovely shiny shoes of the businessman standing next to me. I made it out of the station feeling much better, but still craptastic. I got to the apartment and got an email from my dad asking if I'd picked up the laptop case he shipped to me. I tracked it on FedEx and it had indeed been delivered. I stole my roommate's shoes to go downstairs and pick it up. In my pajamas. Because I just don't care after a long day's work.

I got down there and the attendant was someone I didn't know and hadn't seen before. I've made a point to make friends with the attendants. I told her my apartment number and my name and she said the package had already been signed for.

...What?

I said that I had picked something up a couple of days ago. She said, "Oh, maybe it hasn't been logged yet." And disappeared behind the desk. She came back a few minutes later saying that she didn't see it and then showed me the log where it had been signed. All I could see were a bunch of strange loopies that looked nothing like letters, much less my name, and much much less my signature. I told her so and she looked panicked, kind of like she didn't know what to do. "Oh...um...oh my god...Okay, I'll leave a note here for Caroline in the morning." She wrote down a strange, short-hand synopsis on the situation on a post-it. I explained that I would ask my roommates if they'd picked something up for me. She said okay. I knew none of my roommates had done that. They're all Asian. They have gorgeous, neat lettering and don't know cursive or whatever that language was that was supposed to represent my "signature."

So I've had a package stolen. It was a macbook case from Speck, so it wasn't anything really expensive. I'm disappointed because 1) it seems like Fate has decided I should not have this case because it was supposed to be a xmas present and has been backordered these last three months only to now disappear and 2) I love Fenestra and the security and the apartments and location and everything. I don't want to have to fight with them over paying for this if it was, indeed, stolen. It's their fault. They will pay for it. I just don't want it to get ugly.

And now I've stayed up way past the time I planned to go to bed. I'm looking forward to tomorrow being Friday, even though Saturday I have a field trip with my class to the Freer/Sackler galleries and then to Chinatown for some chow. At least I don't have to leave until 11.