December Meme #5

quichey asked me to discuss anything I wanted for December 19th.

So I guess have some work musings. I've worked in retail on and off for over ten years, and I've been shopping for much longer than that and I've never figured out the habit of people all coming to check out en masse at the same time. I mean, I get it at a crowded supermarket when there's so many people, so there are always people at the registers. It happens when I'm a customer. But at Cracker Barrel, even though there can be a lot of people there, it still confuses me how we can have customers come to the register one at a time, or have these long lulls, with no one around, and then bam, all of a sudden there's a line a half mile long.

Why do some people think it's okay to throw their bills at you? It hasn't happened to often at CB because the customers are generally nice, but it still happens. I know sometimes it's an accident but when it's not it just ticks me off. It doesn't take much effort to just hand it to me.

I'm not sure why people insist that smiling only counts when you display some teeth. I suppose some people only consider it a grin if you don't smile with all of your pearly whites on display. I've even looked up the definition of "smile" and the usage of teeth is not involved, but according to many at work, apparently that's their definition because I've been told that I never smile. I'm not a big toothy grin person, not unless I'm really happy. I get self-conscious because when I smile big, there's a lot of my gums on display and I don't like how it looks and my mom's even told me that it looks odd, so I get self-conscious and I don't usually smile that big. But I am polite and do smile at work. But it seems unless I'm smiling a loon, at all times, it doesn't count. People are constantly asking me what's wrong. I guess I just have one of those faces, that unless I'm smiling I look like I want to murder people.

I'm a pretty quiet talker, so a lot of people don't hear me when I talk, but there are also a lot of older customers at our store, so this doesn't just happen to me - but I love it when I ask someone how there day was and there response is "yep." Sometimes they just haven't heard yeah, and sometimes they have and that's still there response. I don't know why, but that makes me laugh.

I'm really sick of the music at our store. I'm not a big fan of country music in the first place, but the songs we have aren't just especially annoying because they're country, but they're played on an incessant loop. I'm starting to hear some of the songs in my dreams, which...grrr.

Sometimes I don't get how I'm, basically anyway, a writer and love to come up with words for stories, and yet somehow words escape me when I'm on the phone. I've had some awkward times at work when I've answered calls, and simple words like "employee" and "soup" seem to escape the grasp of my brain.

On the good side, I am starting to get the hang of being on the register and dealing with things like returns and upselling certain items.

So I guess those are all my work gripes for now. It could be worse. Not my favorite job ever, but it'll do for now.

Stacey

TOW All (Well Almost All) The Resolutions

Happy Almost New Year!

I don't plan on making any resolutions to own any good smelling leather pants (anyone who watched Friends should get that reference. ;) But since I was finally able to keep my resolution last year, I thought I would make a few more this year. I'll hang on to my resolution from last year - to lose weight. Though I will amend it to keep losing weight.

My biggest resolution is time management. I think that one will help me with my other resolutions. I've been having the hardest time for ages getting organized and managing my time better. Even when I didn't have a job, it always felt like I had a thousand things to do and no time to do it in. And it doesn't matter when I wake up. When I lived with my mother, I regularly woke up at noon and sometimes a lot later. But when I moved in with Mike I made a conscientious effort to try waking up earlier. I talked with a friend and she talked about trying to wake up at 5 or 6, which I knew was never going to happen. But I was hoping that maybe I could eventually work myself up to 7. At first I was doing well, getting up at 8 and mostly 9. But lately I've been slipping and it's past and mostly after 10. I definitely want to try and get back to where I was before.

I've bought organizers to try and help, but they've never worked much before. I don't use it like most people probably use it. I write down my appointments and work schedules, but instead of writing down the things I need to do in a given day or week ahead of time, I use it like a journal and write them down after I've done them. And the organizer I bought for this year was a completely wasted purchase. I had this great organizer, this fat day planner from Mead, but I couldn't find it and had to buy an organizer that was specifically dated for this year. Unfortunately, I only wrote in it a few times this year. I thought about scratching all the dates out and just using it for this year, but I don't feel like it. I'll just have to buy a better one for this year and actually use it better. I don't like keeping to a schedule, which is probably why I haven't managed to stick to one even though I've wanted to. I don't like feeling restricted, but I probably need more structure to be able to get better organized. Not a really, tight restrictive schedule but I need to have some kind of plan to know what I need to do for the day and write it down and give myself time to do it.

Another resolution is to eat a little more variety, especially when it comes to vegetables. I want to eat as many healthy foods as I can. I always says that I have an inordinate amount of taste buds on my tongue, so I'm very hesitant in what I eat because tastes, especially bad ones, are really strong and last a long time after I eat something. So I'm very basic in what I eat and stick to mostly simple stuff. But Mike knows a lot more about food than I do and he's very good about being a bit more adventurous in what he cooks and eats so he gets more vitamins and different nutrients. He's exposed me to a lot of stuff, some things that I insist I don't like, but I've really never tried before. Like Mike likes to eat brussel sprouts, he'll even eat them as a snack, which I found gross. But honestly, other than knowing that people, especially kids, hate eating brussel sprouts I'd never eaten them. One day, he just asked me to try them and I did and they weren't as bad as I feared they'd be. I wouldn't snack on them, but I can eat them every now and then.

I had this friend I used to e-mail with almost every day a few years ago. I met her online a long time ago, and lost touch with her for a little while until I e-mailed her one day and we just kept up with it. She was a great friend and was really good with advice. It always took me awhile to write, because as you may have noticed, I can be very wordy when I write. When I moved in with Mike, I just stopped writing her less and less because I didn't have a lot of time, but I feel bad about that and miss talking to her.

I want to write in my journal more and also to write every day. I had bought The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creative Writing many years ago and it talked about if you wanted to be a better writer one thing was to try and write every day, especially in a journal. So I bought a journal. I was good about writing in it for a while, but then had periods of stopping and starting. I've had that journal for ten years now and there's still a hell of a lot of blank pages, and this is not an especially big journal. I don't know if I'll be able to write every day, but whether it's in the physical journal, here on LJ, or just writing stories, I want to write as much as possible.

I want to watch more movies. I want to watch more TV too, but that'll be a separate post. It feels weird to say I want to watch more movies, since I should probably cut my television time. Mike said he read something somewhere where you should only watch two hours or so of TV a day. But I usually exceed and don't see that changing, though I have cut my time down considerably over the last few years. But still there's a lot of movies that I want to see. It feels like I barely watch any movies, because mostly I'm either watching TV shows or I'm on the computer. When I'm online, I don't want to watch something that I want to pay really close attention to, so I just don't watch a lot of movies that I really want to. I still have stuff on my Netflix queue that have been there for years and years. I have three moves from Netflix collecting dust on top of my cable box that have been there for over a year. So I definitely want to get those very soon.

I'm not good on the phone or talking to my family, but I have a couple of cousins who I really love and have wanted to get in touch with, but haven't found the time but I want to at least once to catch up.

I need to go to the doctor's ASAP. I haven't even had a physical in ages.

I have more, but that's all for now.

Stacey