Today's rambling: No more cakes, please!!!
Written on Wednesday, Jun. 12, 2002 at 8:03 p.m.
while feeling a bit

Thank you, emilina, Megan, Jam, and Lola, for your Notes and emails! And thanks, Tiff, for the phone call!!! *beams* (By the way, emilina - sorry I don't know your name, LoL! - I want to major in Communication...might minor in French, but we'll have to see how that goes!)

The woman from Admissions called me again today, but I was at work, so she still couldn't get a hold of me! She left a phone number and told me to call, so that we could speed up the process by getting housing and orientation settled, but when she left the number she forgot to give me her extension number! So I'll have to call again tomorrow, during regular business hours. I really hope I'll be able to go to the June 27-28 orientation. The only one after that is July 1-2, which would mean I'd have to leave on June 30 (aka my birthday), and I don't particularly want to miss out on any festivities, hehe! Mom said she had some kind of party planned, and I can only hope it's better than her Wildwood idea. ;)

My 'Days of Future Passed' CD came in the mail today...I just got a notice yesterday that it had been shipped, and already it's arrived! Amazon.com rocks. They've always been very reliable and speedy for me. As for the CD, I'm going to have to listen to it when I have more time (the shortest song is nearly 4 minutes long, and the longest is over 8 minutes, so I was just sampling each of the tracks), but thus far it sounds good. Made me want to listen to my Charlotte Church CD, though, because there's a lot of classical-ish music on there.

Work today was interesting. Joanne had left me a note telling me to ice and decorate 8 quarter-sheet cakes, but since I was going to to the back room to do everything (and would therefore have to take all the colored icing), Karen suggested that I just do all the orders. There weren't all that many, so I thought I'd be able to have them done and still have time to at least get a few birthday cakes finished for the shelf. Well, all but one or two of the orders were full-sheet cakes, which are a HUGE pain in the butt to do. Doesn't matter anymore that they were half chocolate and half yellow cakes; our cakes only come in 1/2-sheet sizes anymore, so I still had to paste two of them together. Then I had to put icing in between the layers, since they're split now, and then I had to base-ice and everything...It's just a great big nuisance.

After finishing the cake that was due at noon, I brought it back to the bakery and met up with Geoff, who was on his way out of the bakery...looking for me. ^_^ Of course, I had already asked him earlier if he wanted to go on break later, so it wasn't as if he initiated the search with no prompting or anything. Obviously, I'm going to be the aggressor in this relationship. ;) Anyway, we went on break (it was about 12:20 or so), and after ten minutes I looked at the clock and realized I had a cake due at one o'clock!

"I'm sorry," Geoff apologized, "I don't mean to keep you here!"

I thought for a moment, then replied, "You could sit down in there and watch me decorate..." ('There' referred to the conference room-turned-my-temporary-office, hehe...) I didn't think he'd actually take up on the offer, but after a few seconds he picked up his trash and said, "Let's go!"

So he sat down on a chair a few feet away from me, and I hastily began icing my first full-sheet cake of the day (little did I know how sick of it I'd be by the end of the day). I felt a little awkward with him there watching me (because it makes me nervous to have people watching me work), so I made jokes and told funny little stories to try and draw attention away from what I was doing. As I hastily began smoothing the icing on the first layer, Geoff made some exclamation like, "Wow! I could never do that..." The oddest part was, he was totally serious, and it wasn't even as if I was doing something hard! I didn't have to worry about making the icing look perfect, since it was just in between the two layers and it'd never be seen anyway. But it was nice to be admired. ;)

Dan, Leroy's son, came in just a few minutes later. Without even asking me, he started to base-ice the other full-sheet cake I had put together, and at first I was relieved because it took some of that nerve-wracking attention off of me. But I soon realized that Dan did not know how to base-ice or decorate...and consequently, the border he made around the cake looked terrible, and the balloons he slapped on looked even worse.

Geoff stayed back there with me for over half an hour, which was nice. He smells very good...*chuckles* I sometimes get the urge to come up behind him, press my face against his shoulder, and just breathe in, like I used to do with Mom and Dad. I love things that smell nice, hehe! Anyway, digressing...

Dan had been helping Geoff out in the dairy aisle, but apparently Geoff didn't need him anymore because he left the kid with me after he left. That was when the balloon incident happened. They didn't even look like balloons! They looked like...well, piles of crap, if you'd like to hear Leroy and Geoff's direct opinion. Unfortunately, I don't have the heart to say things like, "Those look really bad, please don't continue." So I figured I'd just let him do his thing, hoping that at some point he'd leave. Finally, when I needed to go back to the bakery for more icing, I dialed Geoff's number.

"Do you need Dan for anything else?"

"No," he replied, apparently thinking that I wanted Dan to stay back there, and he was willing to do me the favor of letting me keep the kid (I say 'kid', and he's 18, heh).

I whimpered piteously, then told him about the horrible job Dan was doing with decorating. Finally, Geoff caught on. "Oh, you want me to get rid of him for you?"

"Yes, please!" I begged.

When I walked back to the conference room, Geoff was once again standing in there...I don't know if he'd just gotten there, however, or if he'd already tried to pry Dan away. The worst thing about Dan is that he's stubborn and sort of egotistical/condescending. He thinks he knows everything there is to know, and he'll argue his point until he goes blue in the face. All the while, he's got this sort of arrogant tone of voice that just makes you want to bash his head against a wall. And really, he's not a bad guy...he's actually pretty nice! He's just irritating! So I suspect that Geoff might have said something to the effect of "Can you help me with blah blah," but Dan kept doing his 'decorating' thing.

When Leroy came in a few minutes later and declared that it was time for father and son to return home, Dan kept on going with filling a decorating bag...until Leroy finally got impatient and told him to leave. Geoff stayed a few minutes longer, praising the work I'd done on the other full-sheet ('spring-colored' flowers), but he left when Kay came in, hehe...

Oh yeah, Dan was trying to give me love advice, hehe...well, not exactly 'love' advice, but basically he said something to the effect of, "I can tell Geoff's just not interested in being in a relationship right now." (Karen's reaction when I told her that: "What, did they have a heart-to-heart or something??")

He also informed me that it isn't always a good thing when two people are too much alike (this came after I told him that Geoff was practically a male version of myself). Sure, that could be true, but geez, who does this guy think he is? Doctor Love?

Right. So in other news, there's this new guy working in the deli. His name's Alex (and he's pretty unattractive, so don't go getting ideas, hehe). And from the moment I first met him (which was yesterday), I disliked him. There's something sort of shifty about him, something that makes me really wary. Karen says he's super nice, and he has been nice, but there's just this underlying...something that sets me on edge! And as I've said before, I'm very good at judging a person's true character, so I'm not passing my feelings off as just 'imagination'. We'll just have to see if he turns out to be the sort of person I think he is, or if I'm wrong and he's actually very nice and genuine.

Today, as I was running back and forth cleaning up the conference room, he called out, "Cake lady! Come here a sec!" Wary, I took a few steps toward him (he was standing in front of the deli counter), and he asked me if I would bring him a chocolate chip cookie later on. Puzzled, I glanced over at the bakery counter and saw a container of them sitting open (the ones we give out to passing kids). "There are some right over there," I told him, pointing.

"I don't want to go over there!" he replied, shaking his head in a dubious fashion as if to say, "I don't wanna get in trouble!"

"Everyone back here eats them," I assured. "You're not going to get in trouble."

"I'm new here, I don't want to," he said. "Would you just bring one over later?"

I know the conversation sounds really boring and unimportant, but it really roused my suspicion. Why was he so damn determined to get me to give him the stupid cookie, when I'm sure he's seen other employees walk over and take one or two? If I was new and was afraid of getting in trouble, I'd just leave the subject alone until I became more comfortable around everyone. I don't know, I can't explain it, but I was really uncomfortable.

I decided that I'd just finish cleaning up and then slip out--hopefully unnoticed--and not even bother with the cookie. There was no way I was going to cater to the man! But then I got sucked into a conversation with Karen, and I happened to glance up once...to see Alex behind the counter, gesturing to me like, "C'mon, where's my food?" He was waiting on a customer, too. Obviously, his prior experience in another grocery store didn't teach him to pay attention to what he's doing.

At any rate, I walked out without proffering any food, so too bad for him if he really wanted that cookie. He'd just have to go get it himself.

Right now I'm really tired, so I think I might go to bed. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, bleh...It's just a regular cleaning, but I'm debating on whether or not to tell them about the molar that's been bothering me a little bit. If anything really cold touches it, I get these little zings of pain, and sometimes it just aches. Not really badly, just a little bit...but still, I guess I ought to get it looked at before it becomes worse.

It's just that I have no health insurance right now (at least, I don't think I do...long story), and the X-rays and whatnot are unaffordable because of that fact. The dentist has been wanting to get X-rays of my wisdom teeth for the past several visits (because they might need to be cut out *cringe*), but I've kept pushing it off because I can't afford it! I need a job with good benefits...benefits that start before a six-month period! I mean, how pathetic is that? "You can have health coverage, but only after you've been working here for six months...and you have to pay every week for it, anyway!"

I was about to tell Safeway it sucked (again), but actually the policy is pretty much the same as when Genuardi's was just Genuardi's.

Right. I'm going now.