My so-called life

Don't ask me why I'm referencing a show I never watched (I'm not sure it was even on TV in NZ?) but I suppose I just feel I have to jazz up the post title a bit...

Anyway, I have been too tired/lazy this week to post properly, so let's try to do a bit of a catchup. Globally (globalement) things are going pretty well. Last weekend my new flatmate Géraldine took me to the movies on Saturday and out bowling (I had *no* clue what she meant until she did a hand action for me - they say the word 'bowling' in French but with a wacky French accent) and for a drink with some of her friends on Sunday. She's so nice! Really pleased with how things went with the flat, think I was due for some flat karma. Also IKEA rang me this morning - victory #1 was that I managed to understand the woman on the bus (I was on the bus, she wasn't) which is not a given and victory #2 is that they are delivering the bed between 7-9 am on Monday. So sucks that I will have to get up super early but good that I will be able to take possession of the bed! On the other hand, the old flatmate had some issues with the bureaucracy surrounding her new apartment, so she'll be moving out on Wednesday. This is fine by me, but won't be able to set up my room until after that. And I was so pleased with myself getting pretty coordinated duvet sets and inners at Ikea yesterday, and then once I opened one of them I realised that I had bought singles. Boo! I swear my brain wasn't working properly yesterday... I got duvets the same size as my mattress (they put the dimensions on stuff instead of calling it double/queen/whatever) and it just didn't cross my mind that the duvet needs to be bigger than the mattress cos there's a person in it. Although frankly, the one I opened does not look like a double even just lying flat, so dunno. I bought two sets, so I might try to return the one I didn't open and change that for a double then just stick the single on top. There goes my dreams of a lovely grown-up bed though. *Sigh* as I wrote on my facebook, I just can't have nice things...

Now, I needed to buy the duvets already because one of the cats (Maya) pissed ALL over the duvet Géraldine lent me RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! I had been warned she might get up to mischief if your back was turned, so I was careful to throw her out if I was leaving, but seriously, I was so shocked when she let loose under my very eyes. It was at bedtime as well, so I had no choice but to stick the duvet in the hall and sleep under a sheet and towel for one night :( AND she just got scared about something (she is the archetypal scaredy cat) and fled the room via my cucumber salad (i.e. she stood in it). Bad cat!

So, work. Work is going pretty well. I have managed to understand all the complex instructions on how to add various things to the site, how to generate code and bibliographic references etc. etc. en français the first time out of the box, so I think your casual observer would be pretty impressed with that. At various points during the week I have felt quite overwhelmed by the core job of retrieving materials to put on the site - it just seems like there's so much stuff out there, but so much of it is inappropriate for the parameters of the site, so I spend ages searching and searching and the end result is that I've rejected a lot of stuff - but that's invisible. You can't build a site by putting a little notice up saying 'hey, you shoulda seen all the stuff I *didn't* put on here'. Today and yesterday I found some pretty good stuff though - spent the better part of the day today chasing down links off iTunes University, so shoutout to Mum for introducing me to that! Then the best part was that we had a team meeting this afternoon with my big boss as well (PS omg, 2 hour meeting on technical aspects of website management in French, much of it pertaining to parts of the site I haven't even been on yet - where was my Focusin, cos I was seriously struggling to concentrate). Anyway, off topic, new sentence. Point was that my immediate supervisor said (in a joking way I *think*) that they might have to put the brakes on me because I was finding so much stuff and then the big boss said that she'd had a look and I'd found as much as the other 3 of them put together. Ha! And here I felt like I was going super slow and not retrieving much stuff :D As my Mum always tells me, got to have more confidence in my abilities.

So that's pretty decent for the first week, and the job's relatively interesting. Have been mousing with my left hand, so my RSI hasn't been too bad - worse on the laptop right now! We have Macs, and so I get regular opportunities to look like a dick in front of the rest of the team. They all have this tendency to gather round my computer screen to help out whenever I ask a question, which is nice, but just shows off that I'm still getting to grips with the different commands and mouse functions with the Mac and of course the differences between French and English keyboards (doesn't help that I switch back and forth every day with the laptop - if you notice a sudden abundance of qs in my typing, it's cos they're where the a is on an English keyboard). The other day I turned up to work before anyone else and had to wait because I didn't know how to turn on the computer!! (To nudge this down the stupidometer a bit, yes I looked for the button, and turns out it's on the back flush with the casing, so very difficult for the uninitiated to find!)

Sometimes I feel a bit out of the loop as I tend not to really pay attention when the others talk amongst themselves about various strategic decisions about the site etc. cos it's kind of hard to follow when everyone just talks back and forth to each other and not to me, and because I can't really work in English and keep an ear out for a discussion in French at the same time. Every so often I'll hear my name and pop my head up and have no clue what's being discussed... But you know, they're nice people, aging from I think 30s to 60s, probably not going to be my best friends, but fine to work with...

Hey, I realised I haven't spoken an entire sentence in English out loud since Saturday when I talked on the phone to my friend Rick for about 10 minutes... Freakadelic man! This has got to be good for my French!

Okay I think that's as caught up as we're gonna get for now :)