Ach... My life starts to feel relativly annoyingly empty sometimes.

I am tired of my job. I get up before the sun and work for 8 or 9 hours, being much too tired by the time I get off to want to do anything productive. I eat at 3pm and then I end up not eating until late, or not at all. I end up staying up too late so I am too tired the next day to get up early if I am not working and do anything productive. So I work and I eat and I sleep.

Er... anyway... yeah.

I called USC yesterday and got a voicemailbox. I left a message to get in touch with me. Left my phone number and e-mail address.

I called USC today and got a voicemailbox, then I got a real person. The real person connected me to a voicemailbox. I left the same message as yesterday. I finaly get off my lazy arse about this and all I can do is leave messages??

Went to the opera on Saturday night. It was good. The daughter of a couple who are regulars at the shop was in the chorus. Yesterday the wife in the couple asked me about singing in the chorus and I would really love to but I just don't know about the scheduling. Turns out they rehearse on monday nights and then the week prior every night. I think I could pull it. The next show will be after the last ACS show. Maybe I can even find a normal 9-5 job soon and not even have to worry about what I do with my evenings aside from music. 3 nights a week singing? I'd love to.

ach, I think I'm going to go to bed now. Gutenacht.
- posted by Nick @ 2/26/2005 12:53:00 AM | 0 comments

 
What's this? Nick is posting again inside of a week? Can this really be? Guess what, it's long -- over 1500 words.

Well, today has been interesting indeed... I was at work today finishing up a batch of roasting when a car came to the drive-through. As I went to get their order I knocked the roasting chamber off the counter and onto the hard ceramic tile floor... The roasting chamber is a cylindrical bit of tempered glass with a perforated metal bottom and a handle, it looks almost like the carafe of some coffee brewers only a little larger.

Yes, glass objects and ceramic tile together go do not. Not if you wish to keep the glass as one solid piece, at least... Yes, shattered it did. Cussed much under my breath I did after I took the drive through order. I went to the Sonofresco website (I posted a quote from there a few months back about UPS throwing the roasters out of airplanes -- a practice they actually partake in with their packages judging by the state of some of the Ghirardelli products we receive) and found the parts list... $150. What fun.

Of course, the price is only a part of the trouble. The real trouble is that we have begun roasting beans two days prior to using them in shop, in order to provide the customer with the freshest, highest quality coffee that is possible, and I had only gotten one pound of the three pounds of various coffees we were to use on Friday roasted so we only had coffees for the rest of today, tomorrow, and a few extras as we always end up with little bits left over...

I called the boss and told her what had happened and she called to order a new one. While she did that I looked at our roasted bean inventory and figured out how to (hopefully) stretch it through the weekend. I did figure this out because I am amazing like that and Carla did get the roasting chamber ordered, as well as a few pounds of beans from our old roaster as the roasting chamber will be a week in coming from the west coast. We will make it through.

Yesterday I had the wonderful task of changing the marquee out on the sign by the road. This is a horrible job, in case you have never done it. Our sign is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 feet high. You have plastic letters about as thick as a CD and a 20 foot extension pole with a suction cup on the end.

Firstly, you must remove the letters that are on the sign. You extend the pole and stand below the sign, looking straight up at it (it also helps that if you do this in the afternoon the sun is just to the left of the marquee, glaring into your eyes as you look up) and insure that you will have a major crick in your neck the next morning as this process will probably take about an hour, and smack at the letters with the suction cup. You have to hit the letter dead on, and just so, allowing the suction cup to stick to the letter. It usually takes a number of hits to grab onto the letter, assuming you haven't managed to just knock it off the sign, at which point you cower and back away while protecting your head because they have rather sharp edges as they fall 25 feet from above.

Your job is to smack the suction cup to the letters and have them stick (this is quite a challenge as some of the letters are old and scratched, and some letters such as "I" are very narrow and do not stick well at all) and then lift them up without having them fall off the pole (in which case you cower again), slide the upper edge under a lip on the line on which you are placing it and set the lower edge into the lip below it.

You then must remove the suction cup from the letter – a task which seems like it would be the easiest part of this operation as they like to fall off so much as you are putting them up there but by some strange law of physics once you have the letters in place the suction cup sticks like you've used Super Glue to hold the letter to it. It does have a small bit of metal holding one side of the suction cup in place so in theory you should be able to twist the pole to the left and have it release the letter. This hardly ever works. More often than not the letter comes out of it's spot and THEN falls off the pole, threatening to cut your head open or put out your eye.

The only thing I have found this bit of metal to be good for is getting stuck holding one edge of the suction cup up when you slap it down onto the letters, causing the suction cup to be useless.

Once you have the letter on the sign you must make sure it's in the proper position. This becomes even more fun when you have a whole word or two on there and realize it's not centered and you must slide the whole thing, letter by letter, over a few inches, hoping that you do not knock the letters or cause one of the already precariously positioned "I"s to fall over on it's side, a situation that often requires you to remove all of the letters from one side or the other of it so you can slide it to the end of the troth and have it fall (and you must cower again). "I"s are evil letters, of this... Er... We are convinced.

And of course, the easiest way to get the letters in the proper order is to lay them out on the ground in front of you so you can't do this if it's even threatening to be the slightest bit windy or they will blow around causing you to curse like a sailor.

Also, people feel it is fun to honk at you as you do this (as if they are the first of the two thousand people to have driven past while you are doing this... task... to do so) and scare the bejezus out of you.

Oh, and to those of you who make fun of signs that use "S" instead of "'S" (note: this should an apostrophe but it's not because... I dont know...) had better not look at my sign as it says "R. Gabriels" instead of "R. Gabriel's" because we HAVE no apostrophes. Actually it says "R Gabriels" with no punctuation at all since the periods are a bright read instead of the black of the other letters (this being because they are actually decimals to go with the numbers).

So there is the sign fiasco, and the roasting chamber fiasco. There is the crick in my neck that I assured would be there this morning with the sign fiasco... Today I was reading and fell asleep and woke up around 8:30pm, having missed choir at church. I hate 6am workdays... I hate them. I need a new job.

At least we had a fairly good rehearsal at ACS last night. The rehearsal last week turned into one of those rehearsals where the director runs through one piece of the work, says nothing about it and goes on to the next one. For those who haven't sung in a formal choir like this it is a bad thing when the director does this. The equivalent of someone stopping talking to you. He was quite pissed at us (and rightly so, it was a horrible rehearsal) and we all knew it. Sometimes, for some reason, a whole choir becomes exhausted at the same time and it's never a good thing for the musicality of the group.

In other news, I need more bookshelves. I have run out of room and I still have about five boxes of books and a box of hymnals that I do not know of it's whereabouts at this time. I love having my books here again though.

Yesterday I bought a radio so I no longer have to sit in my car in the driveway for hours to listen to a show, I can listen in my room now. I have been able to use my cellular phone in the comfort of my room for a few months now. So I should no longer have to sit in my car in the driveway for hours on end any longer.

Oh, and you know how I put a CV axle on my car last weekend? Guess what? I should have replaced BOTH of them last weekend. Guess what I'll be doing soon? Yep.

Ah well, today was my last open of the week and tomorrow is my last workday of the week. Long weekend here I come! I might end up spending Friday doing something with my family – the have decided that they can take some time off of fixing the house, unpacking, working on cars, and being a pastor's family and finally enjoy some time to themselves for a day.

Well, this is quite long enough, so I will end it here with a photo of a portion of my pride-and-joy:

- posted by Nick @ 2/23/2005 09:31:00 PM | 0 comments