A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
Fuck. I got in my grades for this semester and if you're a regular to my blog you know the deal I have with my parents. They pay for my semester as long as I don't get any D's. This semesters past tuition was 1700 bucks, I have 500 in my bank account. I got two D's (photography and Manufacturing Materials). And of course you also know I have a convention coming up in July that's gonna cost me at LEAST 500 bucks. I'll say it again..... FUCK.....
::
As for how work is going, things seem to be doing well, my supervisor watched over one of my recent shifts and basically had nothing bad to say about the job I was doing. This is all great, and with me starting to get comfy with what I'm required to do whenever I go in, I think this job is gonna last me for a while. Of course my mom is now hounding me to get ANOTHER job, why? I have no idea why, I think they're just intent on watching me squirm as they force me into debt with them for the first time in my life as my plans for the IJA stand on muddy ground even though I've already been planning it since JANUARY.
::
I've heard a couple people talking about how they miss Jugglers On Juggling, and my youtube account seems to be running pretty dry lately, so even though I'm not fully set up with a list of topics yet, I'm probably gonna start work on Season 4 for you guys :D
::

Daily Life:
Well I wish that my current job was good for stories, but seeing as how I deal with foliage all day, there's really not much for me to talk about. "I overwatered the plants and because there was no drain in the floor I need to mop up after myself!" Yeah, not really exciting stories. That said, the drive to and from turns out to be a bit of a challenge, especially coming back home. I have two possible routes that I can take, either I can jump on the Parkway, which runs south-WEST too, when I need to go south and East, or I can take 27/35, which goes right where I need it to, but is full of lights and a lower speed limit. I've still not been able to time which way is faster, but let me jst say getting off the parkway and onto the right road home is hellish.

What else can I say about this job. Not much really, but something I can mention which I don't think I have is that I'm mowing lawns on the weekends. I hate doing it, but not as much as I used to since i haven't done it that often for the past year. I'm basically using that money for gas money, which speaking of which why the FUCK are gas prices going up?! Nevermind, I don't want to go into that rant today...

But yeah, that's about it for my working details, let me tell you about Saturday then. I'm sitting there in bed, having just gone in at around 5 AM (yes, I sleep late during the summer), and I find myself waking up to the screams of my mother, who is in the room and yelling at me to wake the hell up and clean my goddamned room. I look over at the clock to find it's not even 10 yet, I've slept for little over 4 hours. I can tell by the mood she's in, and the fact that my dad, as usual, was backing her 100%, that I wasn't gonna win no matter how legit of an excuse I had that I needed to sleep in order to get to work tomorrow on time. I was forced to not only do the usual dusting and vacuming, but to go and fully reorganize my room as well. This took about 3 hours total, and though my room has never been cleaner, there was nothing wrong with it before other than that a clothing basket full of shirts wasn't hung up and my chair needed a spray of febreeze.

Then, once that was done, I was ushered in to vacuum all of the upstairs bedrooms. Okey, not too much of a problem, but as soon as I'm done with that I'm ushered away and told to get some clothes on because I needed to help mom go buy mulch from Home Depot. I grumbled and did as I was told, quickly being rewarded with a free subway sub on the way back as we stopped for lunch. Overall, very nice indeed, and luckily I didn't need to do anything else the rest of the day. But I have something else to gripe about before we move on to my recent juggling accomplishments.

I hate it when my sister is home. It has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with her, or how I feel about her. We get along just fine and everything, but my parents made the rule that when she is home, since she has to sleep downstairs on the couch, I am not allowed to go down. This means I can't watch TV at night, or eat what would be my dinner. And they're strict about it, I swear they've got a stethoscope rigged to the top stair of the staircase, and I hate it. I've gone to bed hungry at least a half dozen times because she was here and I got caught trying to go down to satisfy my hunger. I friggin hate that rule, but I do understand it, the downstairs is essentially her room whenever she's there, and I don't expect anyone to come barging into my room when I'm sleeping, even though they do.... Actually it's kind of hypocritical now that I think about it..... I need to end this rant now before it SERIOUSLY pisses me off :P

Juggle This:
Hey, I've actually gotten a few new tricks for my video in the past two weeks! A few I'm pretty proud of, so let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. I've been working on my 4 ring flat front tricks, and I've made a run, on camera, of 4 ring wimpy's, to synch, to asynch fountain, all in flat front reverse, and each of them qualified. That I was really proud to get on camera, but another rather inventive trick I came up with is a 4 ring grind trick.

Basically, I throw a multiplex to a grind in each hand, then instead of my usual trick where I'd swap the two spinning rings, I throw the entire set of rings, both the spinning ring and the ring being grinded on, in a 31 pattern, catching it and going back to a fountain as the grinds ended. It looks fairly spectacular I think, and it's a lot easier than I thought it would ever be, I made it on the first try ever.

Let me think, what else, OH! I went to my local dollar store oe day, and I found something amazing. It's called the yo-yo-stick, and what it is is essentially a 16 inch long stick with a string coming out the center, but the string is attached to twisted rubber bands inside, so that when the string is pulled out, it will snap back towards the stick. Essentially, the entire thing is a stick that will return to your hand when thrown, and I've found it to be quite an amazing skill toy. I'm currently recording a video of simple tricks I've discovered for it, and if my video editors work soon, I'll have it up before the week is over.

---

---

RANTING TIME:
if you haven't figured out by now, I have the rant and raves section of craigslist constantly refreshing in one of my firefox tabs Recently, a guy on there complained about people who hold up the line at supermarkets. Being a former cashier, I felt I should throw my hat in.

Guy 1: http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1109956752.html

QUOTE

Instead of watching the person check-out your stuff get your payment ready. I hate watching someone watch the cashier scanning ALL your stuff then you look for your CC or start to write your check If using check,fill in store name,date,sign it and wait for total. Sounds simple doesn't it ?

QUOTE

THANK YOU SIR! I was a cashier at the shoprite of Woodbridge from 2005 to 2007 and if there was ONE THING I hated besides when a customer had a massive order and made me bag the entire thing with paper, it was when people would hold up the damned line in any way that was stupid, especially looking for coupons or waiting to start paying and crap.. Just wanted to let you know, most cashiers share in your frustration too.

QUOTE

I'll add my 2 cents. I can't stand these people who won't help the cashier to bag the stuff that they're buying, especially when it's really busy and there's a ling line. It seems like these people feel like they're entitled to that "service" as part of the price they pay, and it also seems as though they're lording it over the cashier, as though bagging their own groceries is beneath them. I knew a woman who said proudly, defiantly, one night at dinner that she would never bag her own groceries. I lost respect for her when she said that.

QUOTE

I was a cashier at Wawa for 4 years, on and off. On top of having to wait for customers to count out the exact change for someone that was $4.38, the thing that annoyed me the most was when they were on the cell phone and were so distracted by the conversation that they would take even longer to pay me. When this happened, I'd just stand at the register and stare at them until they got OFF THE PHONE and then we resumed the transaction. If they refused to get off the phone, I'd do the transaction, but 9 times out of 10, they'd get to the car, then have to come back in because they wanted change or forgot cigarettes or some other thing that they would've probably remembered had their attention been on paying for their things as opposed to what color Joan is dyeing her hair this week. I am so glad I am out of retail and have a real job now. Working with the public is a true test of patience.

QUOTE

Well fool, the reason I watch is because you scanners can't even do that right. I suggest that everyone keep an eye on the screen where the totals are displayed in case of an error. And BTW why not just put the order in a bag as you scan it? Is that too complicated for a moron like you? Scan. Bag. Try it douche. ------------- Instead of watching the person check-out your stuff get your payment ready. I hate watching someone watch the cashier scanning ALL your stuff then you look for your CC or start to write your check If using check,fill in store name,date,sign it and wait for total. Sounds simple doesn't it ?

QUOTE

Well, idiot, if you don't trust the cashier who's JOB it is to ring everything up right, maybe you can trust the RECEIPT. There's a reason why this little piece of paper is handed to you at the end, and that is so you can check and see if something went wrong, something was rung up twice, or whatever, and hey guess what, most cashiers are on the same register for about 3 hours at a time. You can go home, find a mistake, come back, AND TALK TO THE SAME PERSON WHO RANG YOU UP. Granted, no we can't help you once we hit the button to end the transaction, but we do have a phone to call up the manager and we know where the customer service desk is located. If you have a problem with your order, it's not like it's going to KILL you to fix it, customer service usually bends over backwards to fix whatever mistakes a cashier has made as long as you have the receipt. So don't go holding up my line because you don't trust me to do my job, trust the folks at the customer service desk to do their jobs once I've done mine. As for Scan - Bag - Try it douche. What? You think we haven't tried? I'm sorry to have to burst you're little "I'm too important to bag myself because I don't trust the working cashier" bubble, but do you see that row of humans with carts full of groceries behind you? That's called the LINE, and it's our job to keep it moving forward. Let me throw a little math at you, let's say, conservatively, that it takes twice as long to scan and bag an item as it does to just scan it and place it on the conveyor, in reality it takes somewhere around 4 times as much time and the cashier has to be ambidextrous, but I'll leave it at a simple twice as long for you. Now, take a usual customer's order, somewhere around 80 items, or about half a cart. Each item takes two seconds to pick up, find the label, and run it over the scanner to the other side. 2 seconds times 80 items means the order should take (if there are no produce items or troublesome items that need to be punched in by hand) around 3 minutes, and if you're still bagging by the time I'm done scanning everything, I will GLADLY bag whatever is left while you get out your money, that's why I have a set of bags on my end too. Now, let's take that figure of 3minutes, and say I'm doing all the work now. That means the order has taken me a full 6 minutes to do while you sat there and the line didn't move. That's another full customer I could have gotten done with and sent on his merry way that I wasn't able to do because you decided to be a douchebag and not help me out. You see, it's all about ALL of the customers, that's what my job is, to keep as may customers as I can happy. If you want, the next time you're in my line, I'll stop and stand there for three minutes before starting your order, and we'll see how much you and the people behind you appreciate it.

QUOTE

Rich, very well put, Kudos to you, and what I definitely noticed, for those of you that think cashiers are idiots or are not educated, well Rich Bravo to you and the ability to get your point across intelligently. "applause"

QUOTE

Well Rich, I can see why you've reached such heights in your career. To get this straight you want ME to spend whatever time it takes to go home, check the order, COME BACK and THEN try to convince customer service that my order was wrong when I left your register? No thanks. I will check as you scan. And I do this because you are stupid. Too stupid to do even the most menial of jobs. Now try again. Scan. Bag. The bag is right there. It's no more work than putting it somewhere else. Try to take some pride in your job.

I didn't bother to respond, because I'd already made my point, it was late in the day, and I already won the argument

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Listen Up!
So my job is going well. I've learned what I need to do and have been doing it as well as I can. I'm about to get my first paycheck soon, and will be adding it right to my bank account for the IJA. As for more details about the job, I plan on talking about them today along with what a long day seems to be there and why this is so far the best job I think I've ever had.
::
Well there's not much else to say now that college is over. My report came in and I am a little stunned as to some of the grades I got, but no failures which is always good. Basically, I passed the main course I needed to pass this year, which was my last Civil Engineering course, and now all I need to do is apply for the Drafting Certificate and I will be a certified Draftsperson, and if all goes well and I get used to the workload at Home Depot or decide I need MORE money, I can find a job right now as a draftsperson somewhere and work in AutoCAD.
::
There really isn't much else to talk about this week. I haven't been doing a hell of a lot because this past week and a half has been my week to break from college before I start working on personal projects again like my next juggling video or deviantART submissions and such. Either way, my break went well, and now it's time to generate some content! Including, maybe, the plans for JoJ Season 4?.....

Reeses2150's Reviews For The Intelligent Human
STAR TREK
Let me start off by saying, I was SO scared about this movie. The first teaser trailer got me amped, but then I started thinking as more and more trailers came out "Wait, all they're showing is action?" and then I see the tagline "This isn't your dad's Star Trek" and hear the quote from McCoy "We've got no captain and no first officer to replace him" and each of them made me cringe with fear that JJ took the franchise away from what it was all about and turned it into an excuse to have big space battles with no respect to the canon at all. Walking out after the end credits I could not have been more wrong. I saw three big flaws in the movie that I'll spoiler alert about later, but for right now let me talk about the masive amounts of good that this film brought to the table. Firstly, the casting for everyone was BEAUTIFUL. Getting Zachary Quinto to play Spock was an absolute stroke of GENIUS, and the only two people that didn't seem to fit their roles well were Checov and Uhura. Everyone else did Magnificently.

The story now. This is where the bread and butter of Star trek has lied for MANY years, is it's great storytelling. I wish I could explain without giving away half the movie, this movie really is best seen when you have no idea what to expect. Let me just say though, that my biggest fear was that JJ was going to just hash together a story that allowed for nonstop action with little or no reason. Not the case. Though there was a LOT of action in the movie, and it did feel a lot like Wrath Of Kahn at times, there was still plenty of explaining and storytelling to justify it. By far one of my biggest fears was because this was an origin story, that JJ was going to completely throw away the entire Star Trek Canon in favor of his own vision. Though that is EXACTLY what he did, he managed to creat a story that did that WITHOUT slapping the old Canon in the face. Two words. Alternate Timeline. and that's all I'll reveal for you guys.

Now for the 3 little errors I caught, and these are *spoilers*. #1, how the hell can Uhura order a Cardassian drink in the 23rd Century? Starfleet wasn't even halfway to exploring Cardassian and Bajoran space until the 24th century, but here's Uhura before the Enterprise even takes off ordering a cardassian drink on the menu. #2. And this is where it gets serious. Why the hell doesa black hole suddenly turn into a time machine with NO modifications or special treatment? Just like that, this "Red Matter" ignites and creates a black hole, which should crush anything that falls into it right? No, instead, as Spock's and Nero's ships get dragged into the black hole, they suddenly just pop out somewhere else in the past. #3. What the hell is with this "Red Matter" anyways? It's never explained at ALL, and somehow it seems that a drop of the stuff will create a black hole big enough to suck up a planet, as where the entire sphere of the stuff, which must have been a BILLION drops worth, created a black hole EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE, MAYBE EVEN SMALLER! Can someone please explain how that fits into the laws of physics? Please?

Daily Life:
Well let me talk about my working environment, which is absolutely wonderful. I already said last week that my basic job is to water all the plants, put out new ones, remove dead ones, label everything that needs labeling, and organize/rearrange all the plants. So now let me give you just a quick bit of info on what the working environment is like. INCREDIBLE. Basically, I make my own hours, so I just need to go in whenever I need to, call the main office to clock in, do the stuff on the list, with NO supervision, NO limitations on when I can/can't go to the bathroom or grab a drink of water, and with no time limit or anything, and then just call the office again to clock out when I'm done. This is by far the best job I've had. But there are a few drawbacks that make it a little tough to do.

#1. scale. The number of plants in both the stores I maneg is ENORMOUS, and having to water/manage EACH plant every time I'm there, it isn't hard, but it's time consuming as hell and tedious too.
#2. Space. Every 3days an order comes in, and though this is the summer and people buy a lot, half the time I'm there at either store I'm finding myself staring at a ful cart of flowers with NOPLACE to put them, and that's my job is to rearrange everything and make room.
#3. Insects. I have to make sure that the insects don't get into any of the plants and eat at them every time I'm there, so that's another tedious thing I need to do and check for that makes the job suck somewhat.

Other than that, the rest of the suck is all minor stuff that can be related to ANY job, like filling out and faxing paperwork, to helping the random customer that doesn't understand I'm in a different department than they need help in, and whatever. But so far, I'm happy, and I'm making a fair bit doing this stuff, so let's hope it lasts until July eh?

Juggle This:
Sorry, nothing here this week simply because I've been busy relaxing and doing work at my new job to juggle much, that and with my college classes over, I've lost my access to the great high roofed places around campus that I usually juggle at. I'll swing back to campus once every few weeks to do some practice, but for now, things are slowin down slightly.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Listen Up!
I AM SO HAPPY TO SAY I HAVE EMPLOYMENT!!!!! YES!!!! I am now working for the Home Depot of Garwood and Elizibeth (yes they're both a ways away from Sewaren, but whatever) as the floral representative for an affiliated company. Basically it's gonna be my job to make sure to go into both stores at least 3 times a week and water the plants, remove the dead ones, keep track of them, and put out new shipments when they come in. I'm essentially the floral product manager. It's not a hard job at all, and the thing I love most is I'm gonna be able to make my own hours, the thing I may end up having problems with is that I may not have ENOUGH hours. I really want to crank myself into gear and make tons of money before my trip to the IJA in July, and from my first day of work yesterday, it seems as though each day I'd only be working about 3 or 4 hours... We'll see what happens I guess...
::
The college semester is OVER! I've already had my finals in 3 classes, and just have my Photo final tomorrow before I'm free to work for the summer. I'm kind of loathing this semesters end, because a few of my good pals are transferring out of MCC over the summer, including Jacob and Mark, two of my best pals. It's a little sad, but hey, I'm getting in with the people in the media arts classes, so it's not all bad. What was I talking about again?
::
Tech.MCC is gonna start summer meetings next week, which is awesome. We never got the chance to do anything with the robotics kit we ordered, and I think we still need to do a community service project because I have no idea who went to help with the end of the semester party, but overall this was a good year. I'm finally having Gordon actually TEACH me some things, I know what we need to do as a club, I'm learning what works and what doesn't, and we're getting new members who are willing to do stuff. One of the best ideas I had that turned out to be a MASSIVE hit was I asked members to bring in their old computer parts they had laying around and didn't want to give away to the other club members, holy crap did this get a good response! Free tech stuff to mod and play around with? What could be better!?
::

Daily Life:
So my first day working in the floral section at Home Depot of Garwood. Not really all that exciting, especially compared to my other jobs. I started the day by going in and meeting the supervisor from the affiliate company I'm working for, and she showed up about a half hour after I did, so I spent that time blocking/facing (in other words rearranging to look nice) all the plants outside, because I don't need to water them, it's raining. I then went to the foyer and began removing the few dead plants there were, and in the middle of that, she arrived to help.

So she explains to me how dead a dead plant is before we consider it dead and throw it out. Yeah, there's a certain level of deadness something has to achieve before it is worthy of being canned. But I digress, we did that and cleaned up and snipped all the dead blossoms from the plants and made our way to the inside shelves, where we really started cleaning up and making room for the shipment which was due to arrive that day but hadn't yet. So we do that, it takes about an hour, and the shipment still hasn't arrived, so we grab the massive watering tank, which is an awesome piece of equipment, basically a massive 40+ gallon tank on wheels, hooked up to a garden hose with a nozzle. So we fill it up, which takes a half hour (during which time we continued to face/block the plants), go back, and I water everything on the inside of the store. This takes about an hour, and now we're left with nothing to do and the shipment still hasn't arrived.

She tells me one key piece of info, and that is that if the shipment is this late and you have nothing else to do but wait, just clock out and come organize the shipment another day. So that's exactly what we did, she showed me how to fill out the what we threw away sheets and how to clock out before we clocked out and I left for class. Basically, pretty easy, just a matter of doing things is what it all is.

Juggle This:
Wow, uh, yeah. I have hardly done any juggling over the past week. I actually feel kinda mad at myself for not juggling anywhere near what I should, but somehow every time I do juggle, I haven't seemed to have lost anything and am still improving on some things. Granted, some things I simply have not practiced and have suffered immensely, like my 4 ring mess, but eh I can't practice everything. I really do wish there was more I could put here, bu8t really NOTHING juggling related has happened to me in the past week, absolutely nothing. It's quite annoying.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150