Thursday, 28 April 2005

I am going to make a new autumnal, freshly-coloured website layout soon. I promise. Just as soon as I take the right digital photographs.

~ posted by Anna @ 10:13 pm
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The Queen Of The Damned
I have henna'd.

Perhaps I feel a need to be closer to the twins, Maharet and Mekare, of whom I am again reading. Or mebbe I need some autumn colour of my own; and now I shall fall to the ground and rot into leaf mould. (If only I could smell that good.)

I guess that's all that worth saying right now.

~ posted by Anna @ 9:44 pm
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Monday, 25 April 2005

'Rage', revisited
Tornadoes build inside me
Coils of dark clouds
twist around my heart
curling, tightening, cutting out all emotion and reason
My hands clench, claw, twitch until they are white
like the white-hot rage melting my happiness.
I want to smash a window, scream, rip all the hair off my head
I have no release
Anger fills me up like a torrent of electrified water;
tears up my insides
And I refuse to cry.
Lightning threatens to strike out from my fingertips,
or my mouth, but I won't let it.
Surely the storm will pass or wear itself out soon.
Surely a lonely little witch is allowed to be angry too...

~ posted by Anna @ 7:54 pm
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Tuesday, 19 April 2005

I WANT LEXX season two this year. For my birthday, please. Pleeeeeaaase...

~ posted by Anna @ 9:35 pm
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Eye'm scareded
My job has suddenly become thoroughly complicated!

It seemed innocent enough when last Friday I went to hand in my signed contract (same as the old one, only because of our new owners), and Mrs A asked me if I would like to try some office work. She said, from my checkout records, they think I'm fairly accurate, so they're trying me out on their paperwork.

Only that was last Friday, and now it's next-next-Tuesday-night and the gal who's done this work for fifteen years is suddenly leaving on Thursday, and I've had maybe eight hours at most, over several days, to train with her and I feel very overwhelmed.

I think I'll be able to do what they need me to do. It's just that I wish I'd had more time to be trained in this work that was heretofore something whose existence I was not aware of. Sorting the messy, numbered guts of a supermarket... and as I can only learn this by DOING it, I am starting out slowly and hoping fervently that I'm not doing anything wrong. My innate paranoia with figures makes me check, and check, and re-check everything I do. Perhaps this worry will fade with time, as I find that - wow! I'm actually doing things correctly!

It's weird suddenly being more than just a checkout chick. I never would'a expected this as my secondary supermarkety tasks. I'll be happier when they segregate my hours a bit, so I don't have to worry about being called to checkouts in the middle of messy paperwork. I'd like some days doing oh-so-simple checkout work, and other days for me to focus on officeythings.

I must pause to say it's a relief that there's another gal in the office who's being trained in the same things. here's hoping we can share the role of the departing person... jeez, I don't even know her job description. Bah humbug. They'd better give me a payrise soon; that's all I can surely say.

I'm afraid I got quite panicky when I realized how many - ick! - telephone calls I'll have to deal with as part of being Upstairs, and trying to help various people in the casual role of being the front face of the office. It just happens that way. I'm taking on more than I ever expected. Guh.

It didn't help at all that I woke up feeling mightily depressed this morning. I don't know what's wrong with me, except perhaps for goddamned PMS. I found myself standing in front of the pantry staring at the withered crusts of bread and tins of food, close to tears, despairing at what to have for breakfast, not to mention making something to take for lunch. Goddess bless my mother who looks after me in such times of hopelessness. I just felt like crawling back into bed and bawling. This is not a good feeling to be experiencing while having to serve customers in an hour's time. :/

Perhaps my upset is somewhat due to relief from some of our family troubles... I won't go into them here; suffice to say we have a human leech trying to suck the lifeblood out of us because he used to live with my deceased great aunt. But my other, living, great aunt has agreed to help us out with living expenses while we try to detach said leech, while he tries to sue us. Grrrrrr.

Anyway...!

I'm hoping that tomorrow I can ignore my extra piles of duties; to sleep in in the morning and just be a checkout chick in the evening. I need a day to relax from it all. Then on Thursday I can start worrying again. Yes, it's usually one of my days off, but since I'm working from five-'til-nine for one of the girls, I'll go in early and ask stupid questions of my officey teacher, on the last possible day before she resigns from us. *sighs deeply*

At least Sunday and Monday will be simpler. Sunday will be quiet; and I'll go in on Monday before any customers come in, since it's a public holiday for half the day... I'll be doing some of yet someone else's work while he goes on holiday. Nice, easy shelf-ticketing... boring, but easy, and good to be paid for. Ha ha ha.

~ posted by Anna @ 8:47 pm
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Tuesday, 12 April 2005

"I'm a little black raincloud, of course."
That should have been the title for yesterday, Monday, only I was too Mondayed out to blog. (Not that I need excuses to not blog. Bad Anna.) All I want to comment on is the fact that the pleasant autumnal fog cleared off just in time for me to go to work. Ergo I was stuck inside all the sunny hours of the day as smiley customers came in from enjoying the best of autumn to do their shopping. They'd cheerily ask me how I was, and my answers got more and more monosyllabic as the day wore on... I turned into the little black raincloud of the day. (I was powerfully jealous. I LOVE crisp, blue autumn weather. I'm waiting impatiently for the leaves to start to change so I can try some artsy-fartsy photos.) I'm afraid today was about the same conditions, only it didn't get to me so much...

Today was odd, but okay. I got to be an office chick in training for my first two hours of the day. They've asked me to try some paperworky stuff since they think I'm fairly accurate, and as the main office gal is soon to resign, they need to partially replace her. Today involved listening and watching and sorting and checking of lists and invoices and so on. I'll do more on Friday. So many numbers to keep track of; by the time I went back down to the checkouts my brain was full. I felt like I had lost my peripheral vision, my awareness of other people, from doing such concentrated tasks. Yipe. I can only imagine that the bosses will be much more bothered by my possible departure sometime in the near future when they've started training me in more ways, making me more useful to them. On the other hand, I might find that if I can do some officey things part time, I won't hate working in a supermarket so much. Mebbe I could stay a while. But I must say, when I wondered if they'd ever give me some other tasks to do, I never expected it would be officey stuff. Hmmmmm.

It was Nana and Aunty Syl's combined birthday party last Saturday. We all toddled into Wellington for a snazzy family get-together at my aunt 'n' uncle's house. It turned out bigger than we expected; all sorts of folks arrived! Not just me and Mum and Dad and my aunt and uncle and cousins, but most of the cousins partners, Mum's cousin and her partner, my uncle's cultured cousin from London, and some more folks whose relativity I can't even remember. Yikes. I can never fully relax at this kind of party... and having to talk about myself is always awkward, even when the social barrier of being strangers is removed by them being Family... I never feel that I'm expressing myself clearly. Plus I feel embarrassed by forgetting all the details about them which I ought to know. *sigh* Never mind. It's good for me, and it was good over all. La de da.

Mum's gone into the darkness of Wellington tonight to rescue Dad from University and the inevitable off-peak slowness of public transport. So it's just me, and I'm drinking scrumpy and occasionally breaking into off-key singalongs with the music on the CD player. I'm also scouring the bead sites of the web, from the hundreds of links in this beading magazine a coworker loaned me. I happened upon an astounding site last night, filled with lots of scrumptious gemstone bead strands at wholesale prices, so I couldn't resist spending the $30 I made the other day when I sold some jewellery to another coworker (yay). I must keep this up. And I must upload new and better photos of my jewellery to earthenwords. 'Earthenworks', perhaps?

Time for some more scrumpy. Bye.

~ posted by Anna @ 6:14 pm
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Friday, 1 April 2005

Shit Upon It...
...From a Great Height.

Stupid needle broke when I tried to pull more thread through it. I'm making a very very very very very long seed bead necklace, but how do I prepare enough double thread for it without making a tangled mess? I separated out Not Enough thread last time, and I couldn't pull more out without difficulty. Now my finest beading needle is broke. Grrrrrrrrr.

~ posted by Anna @ 9:20 pm
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Recently
Isn't it funny how different things in our lives can seem connected in unexpected ways? Like hearing a song you've listened to and loved for years; and suddenly you think how it could be the song of a character in a book or film you've read/watched a dozen times... I love it when I see new layers of familiar things and it only makes them more special to me. There's no point giving examples because these things only make sense in my mind, my senses that put them together.

But, oh! my thoughts make so much more sense when I think them than when I try to put them into words. An eternal shortcoming. Sometimes I wonder how I can be a poet at all when I have such trouble verbalising in everyday life. Admittedly I haven't written anything in a long time. It makes it seem so much more of a gift when I can snatch some lucid thoughts out of the air and make them into poetic phrases. The ability is hidden in me somewhere.

It's not bothering me currently that the muses have put me aside; I have a wonderful new activity to keep me occupied. You've seen some photos; now let me say how much I am loving jewellery-craft. Unfortunately I'm spending far too much money on it, but hopefully I'll be able to sell enough of what I make to be able to keep creating. It's so good having a creative outlet again! I've been beading, twisting, crimping, etc. for weeks now, but every now and then I sit back and think - wow! I love what I'm doing! I have a marvellous hobby.

What I have to be careful of is staying within the same moulds all the time... I need to branch out, to try new things. I'm sure there's an almost infinite range of jewellery I could make once I gather the necessary skills and supplies. I find some inspiration from seeing what jewellery other folks wear... although I wholeheartedly try to avoid what's trendy. I might make one or two 'floating necklaces' to sell if people want them - they're easy after all - but I please myself most of the time. What else could I do? I don't want to pander to trendy people, I want to provide different jewellery.

I've taken the clearest photos I can manage and I'm going to upload them to my website and have a gallery. It can function as a kind of portfolio for my work, and perhaps someday soon it will be the gallery for an online shop. Wooooo.

~ posted by Anna @ 8:27 pm
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