So, I guess I oughta vomit down what's been going on in this gruesome little parody of a personal life that I've been half-assedly maintaining for the past few years or so.

First and foremost: Nope, my job hasn't stopped sucking. In fact, not unlike the desperate Jack Thompson looking for a new way to blame cancer on GTA, it just keeps on inventing new ways to suck more. Just as I had planned on applying to use one of my vacation days to drive down to visit my brother for a weekend (that theoretically would not involve horrifyingly over-the-top parties that touch my mind in ways that make it uncomfortable), they decide that nobody is allowed to use vacation days until plant shutdowns, of which there are two per year, one in the summer and one at Christmas. Rad. You see, now the entire management of the plant, save for our supervisor, is straight from Ontario, French Canada that is, which means that most of them are assholes and nearly all of them are clueless. Case in point: I don't know if they've enacted it yet or if they're only planning on it, but they want to pool overtime pay until the end of the year. That is, save it up and then give all of your overtime to you at once at the end of the year. All I can say is, if they do, Labor Relations' foot is gonna break off in their ass, because a little research reveals that this is even less legal than it is smart. Huzzah!

The Computer Programming course I signed up for? Uh, I haven't lost the materials, and that's about the only good news on that front. Fact is, even in this situation, I can't motivate myself. When I get home from that whore of a factory every night with a stabbing pain running back and forth in my left eye socket and feeling like somebody backed a tractor over my legs, basically all I want to do is kick my legs up and pretend to be dead for the next 10 hours so everybody else will leave me alone and stop asking me for money. I know it's my only justifiable way out of the job, too, and it's gonna take me probably at least a year to finish it once I start. Ah well. I'm pretty sure working on it was my near year's resolution, like that means anything, so I still have 4 months.

Sable went through Kitten before you could say "stop growing up so much, kitty" and is probably now still in the range of Surly Teenager and carefully sizing up Adult before she makes a running jump at it. She's causing a lot of trouble, but we're gonna have her fixed soon, which should hopefully settle her down a bit. We're also kicking around the notion of getting her declawed if that doesn't happen, but we'd rather not. It's pretty traumatic on them. Despite being a nuisance and periodically hurting us and herself, she's still our baby. :3

Not all is gloom and doom and cats, I suppose. My dad and I have been talking a bit about getting ourselves a loan and buying a duplex so we could both occupy a half of it, and now that's getting dangerously close to happening -- probably in about a year. We're talking about American Dream stuff now. While we were talking about this, I was suddenly beaned upside the head with a little bit of perspective. Stepping back and taking a good wide look at my life, the only real problem with it is my job -- well and a couple of little personality issues, of course, but most of these are tied closely to the job. And even the job, I guess, is something to be thankful for. I'm making reasonable pay in a pretty stable position, even if I do hate it. I own my own car, not at all a half-bad one I may add, and now I'm looking at getting into my own place. So I've still lived with my parents so far, but that's a roommate thing more than anything else. I've never gotten anything I couldn't pay for. I'm sure more than a few of my generation are still pretty much into drugs and stealing things, so, you know, I'm glad to be where I am, I guess. Of course there's room for improvement, but hey, I should probably give myself a little more credit.

Gaming? Well, after weeks of waiting, it seems that Super Mario RPG finally just hit the Virtual Console today, so I'll want to be on that before too long. Still chipping away at the final tiers of Final Fantasy 4 DS, and also still compulsively Monster Hunting. Speaking of which, I should soon be getting a little WiFi dongle which will allow me and several friends to cheat our PSPs into letting us play that shiznit ONLINE on the INTERNETS, yo. That will be double plus rad supreme. Oh, and I'll be helping myself to a PS3 whenever that September price drop happens, most likely replete with GTA4 and Soul Calibur 4. So, woopwoop.

Right now? I dunno. Shortly ago I was suddenly hit by a horrible crashing wave of depression to the effect of how freakin' lonely I seem to feel all the time these days. Yeah, there's the other thing I could probably stand to improve in my life. I'm the 22-year-old nerd whose closest exposure to a same-aged member of the fairer sex was a solitary hug. God damn I'm a loser. And all the worthwhile girls just have to live 6 billion miles away, don't they? Harumph. Emo emo wah I'm a lonely nerd whatever. You didn't come here to read this noise. I seem to have recovered from it for the moment, though it might come back because my Labor Day weekend is ending rapidly. Who knows.

Umm yeah. So, to summarize: Most things are okay even if I don't always think so. I'm now unbelievably hungry and am going to fashion a spear out of this ornamental walking stick and some very advanced papercraft and go hunt a hamburger or something. Wow, my thoughts are suddenly becoming less coherent quickly. I'd better end this.