MyTunes Monday: Blame It On The Tetons

Good News Wrapped in Bad News Wrapped in Good News

THIS is a babe!!!

The good news: earlier this week at work I got word that someone who came in described me as "a babe." Awesome sauce. The bad news: this person is sans Y chromosome. Can't win them all I suppose. The good news: the person who relayed this message to me was a quite handsome male co-worker...who bats for my team. Maybe he was thinking what she was thinking. *mind racing with possibilities*

Since I just started there, I'm still trying to get the feel of my co-workers: who is trustworthy, who are the gossips, who are the assholes, yadda yadda yadda. It's weird how I see "a game of thrones" gets played out in life all the time. That story has permeated my consciousness in a way that few stories have. Even office politics sometimes looks like the great houses of Westeros jockeying for power. Of course it's me who is the one trying to figure out who the players are and what role they're in.

Other than adjusting to the pace, everything seems to be going well thus far. I'm making more money right now as a trainee than I was making at my last job which is nice especially given A) how much of my savings account I burned through and B) how much I'm trying to save for next Summer (thousands). It's going to be a busy week too. Some sort of a financial plan is coming together. I'll be talking to my bank some time this week. Hopefully things stay on this heading.

MyTunes Monday: First Day

Seriously, this song is how I felt on my first couple of days back at work last week.

MyTunes Monday: Young Love

Operation Rio: Phase 1 Complete

It looks like after over 3 months of being unemployed, I've finally gotten a job. This was the most important step of making my trip to Brazil possible. Thank God that's done. I fully intend on throwing myself into it and putting as much money as possible in the bank because this trip is going to cost A LOT of money, probably thousands. The flight alone...yikes. Aside from just putting as much money as possible, I have some semblance of a financial plan that I will be putting into play.

The next major step: passport. Having never set foot out of the country, I don't have one. I'm pretty sure this is something that's going to take a long time so I need to get on this. I'm not exactly sure about what the process entails, but bureaucracy will be involved. Oh joy.

I'm also going to create a file where pretty much everything about this trip will be enumerated: costs, dates, weather, things to be purchased (clothing and such), and whatever else I think of.

A friend of mine who is getting married within the next year has said that every time she thinks about the wedding, she gets really excited, and then feels incredibly daunted because of everything that needs to be done. Given how I feel about this trip, I can only imagine how she feels a freaking wedding.

MyTunes Monday: All-American Boy

Slogging Through the Pages

James Madison

A while back (late 2012) I mentioned getting a bunch of stuff from Amazon.com including "The Federalist Papers." For those who don't know, these were papers written by three of the founders of America (John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison) which tried to convince Americans to support the ratification of the United States Constitution by enumerating the reasons why it would be better for the states to all stay together instead of splintering off into either all separate entities or into a handful of confederacies. I've been wanting to read this for a very long time and I finally started reading it maybe a month ago. It isn't particularly long. There are 85 papers spanning 256 pages, and none of the papers are particularly long (the longest was maybe six pages thus far). Unfortunately, me be the slow reading, easily distracted person that I am, I haven't gotten very far. I've been reading for a few weeks but I'm only on number fourteen, page 36.

Don't get me wrong, it is a good read. The language soars a bit at times, but it's manageable (unlike "Common Sense" which was a bit out of my league linguistically speaking). It also mentions things that we don't often think about in terms of how the country we know has prospered over the last 237 years. It also makes you wonder about what may have happened if some people had gotten their wish and the Constitution had not been ratified, causing the States to separate into multiple entities.

Another reason I'm going rather slowly is a bit more practical. As I'm reading, I'm also highlighting the particularly important passages pretty much the same way I did back in my school days. I'm not just reading this to read it, I'm also trying to understand what is being said as I go along.

I'm setting the goal of finishing this book in the next two weeks, starting when I click "Publish" on this blog post.

Note to self: spend less time on social media and more time doing stuff that actually matters.

MyTunes Monday: Green & Grey

The studio version is actually better but I couldn't find that on YouTube.