Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The 2nd Day

My second day of work started out a little rushed, as I woke up 5 minutes before I was supposed to meet my new travel buddy to go to our meeting. Fortunately I can rush out of the house at the speed of light and was only 5 minutes late to picking up my carpool buddy Oanh. She's pretty cool, and is into board gaming, likes physics from a layman's and artistic standpoint, and is working at the Science Museum in St. Paul, and is therefore awesome. She also got me listening to 89.3 The Current, which has a lot of indie scene music. I think I still prefer 92.5 because of my classic rock addiction, but it is pretty cool. We also discussed why indie movies are tending to suck nowadays (they are way too self consciously trying to be "indie") and the distinguishing traits of the genre (kind of quirky, discordant music and an air of "we don't care if it's bad, it's unique and kooky!")

Training today involved a lot of going online and learning to use the CTEP website. It looks like it could be a really useful tool, if only to find cheap places to eat, recipes, and entertainment options. My 2nd year buddy Mark "Thor" Thorson set up a poll to see whether we wanted to start some kind of regular game night, and we got all positive responses (though about half only wanted to do so on without any kind of commitment and the other half wanted to do it about once a month). That should be pretty cool, though it may mean that I now have to actually learn all the rules to Arkham Horror... *shudders*

We also had to post biographies about our computer partners on the website, and in mine I had Thor put down that I was into geekery including pen and paper RPGs. This led me to meet Kate, a self proclaimed RPG fanatic who has played pretty much every kind of D&D and WOD game out there. She's currently in a game of new WOD Changeling, which I am definitely curious about and may join if I have time/ inclination. I also discovered that a) there is apparently a con in St. Paul in the winter called the Con Up North [or something to that effect] and b) she's into Magic. Yay geeks!

The rest of our session was spent doing a Q&A session about Americorps life with the veterans in our group. This was pretty informative, and I learned a lot about the things that can go wrong, how to get food stamps/ extra food, and how to deal with children (never, ever give them any ground. We don't negotiate with terrorists, so let's not start it with our children.) This kind of freaked me out, but I also came to realize that these people all got through their first year fine and are coming back for a second, so they obviously didn't screw up too much and actually enjoyed their position. Heck, one guy became involved with a children's tv broadcast without any kind of video production knowledge, and he's still in for the second year there! Coincidentally this guy, Steve, knows Teagle and Egerman from Trivia Night at the Nomad Pub. Crazy, eh?

As I may have mentioned yesterday, I have a lot of lamb at home now thanks to CTEP's generous policy of ordering way too much food at our gatherings. As a consequence of this I have made home made gyros pizza (yesterday), and today made lambsagna (once again delicious). I won't bother putting the recipe down here, as you can just find it on the side of the lasagna noodle box (just replace ground beef with chopped up lamb strips). Since we still have half an ice cream bucket left of the stuff, Jason is going to make lamb curry tomorrow, which will be awesome as I will probably get home later from work tomorrow (I get to see my site finally!). Now I am going to collect the information for applying to grad school, which will hopefully be completed by the time the week is out (ha, ha, ha.).

Oh, and one more thing. I was trolling geeksaresexy.com and found this article about how an english prof wants to get rid of standardized spelling. I, for one, am appalled and horrified at the possible consequences of this.

Well, that's about it for now. Until next time...

"...simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far."
- The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling speech by Mark Twain, December 9, 1907

1 comment:

Draskireis said...

Yo. Glad to hear you're (along with Miss Carroll) coming down here soonlyish. As you ought be aware, you've got a floor/couch/twin-sized air mattress available to you if you don't already have a place to stay. Also, thanks for being the first and only person to submit your link to me.