the minor frustrations of everyday life

Things I have done today:

1. Wash dishes at 4am (...my sleep schedule is still out of whack from my blue funk, shut up) and drop my favorite glass to shatter all over the kitchen floor. Then I had to sweep up the fragments by hand with damp paper towels, because I couldn't run the vacuum cleaner at that hour and wake my upstairs neighbors and their baby! *headdesk*

2. Buy a new pair of slippers, because the sides of my old pair were giving out. (Also the lining was worn away to pretty much nothing, but since I only wear them over socks, that was not exactly a pressing issue.) Mmmmm, nice, comfy, warm slippers that were on sale for under twenty dollars... *curls toes happily*

3. Start reading Kuroko no Basuke so as to better understand branchandroot's fic. I am not sure this was a good life decision.

4. Attempt to get back to writing "Trollstuck." Crash headfirst into the minor world-building problem of how in the seven hells Vriska's vision eightfold actually works. I mean, seven pupils in one eye are only going to focus extra light on the same retina, right? So how does that equate to ~magic eyesight~ or whatever? Why do they glow red when she's staring really hard at something? I assume her psychic powers must be involved somehow, but god damn it, I didn't expect I'd need to come up with a good technobabble handwave for this! I just want to get through a bit of exposition and take votes on which character should talk to her online! Gnrgh.

5. Decide on an idea for my Yuletide fic. My recipient wants minor character and/or OCs? Great! The character I plan to write about appears for less than a single page in the entire saga. ...And now I need to invent her nearly out of whole cloth. Oh well, it's not as if I don't have experience there. At least she has a few lines of actual canon dialogue, which is way more than I had to work with when creating Ilgamuth Tarkaan.

6. Figure out why I kept occasionally feeling drafts and smelling cigarette smoke in my bedroom. It turns out that when I removed the screen and closed the window for the autumn, I didn't actually close the window, since the top pane had slid down two or three inches over the summer, and therefore when I turned the lock it went over the housing it's supposed to slide into, which, like a dumbass, I completely failed to notice. *headdesk* That is fixed now.

[Meme] Top 5 things to keep in mind when writing various characters

As seen around in various places:

Pick a character* I've written and I will explain the top five** ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.

* Try to make it someone I've written either often or recently in order for me to answer.
** May not actually be five.

-----

Susan Pevensie (Chronicles of Narnia), for branchandroot

Ginny Weasley (Harry Potter), for silverblade219

Haruno Sakura (Naruto), for silverblade219

Prince Rabadash (Chronicles of Narnia), for hungrytiger11

Dave Strider (Homestuck), for askerian

Aravis Tarkheena (Chronicles of Narnia), for rthstewart

Lucy Pevensie (Chronicles of Narnia), for snacky

Uzumaki Naruto (Naruto), for vehrec

smoke shop saga

Today was a day of great argh.

Back in August the smoke shop lost two employees nearly simultaneously, and the remaining staff got very stressed out while PM tried to find a new hire. (You would not think that would be so hard in this economy, but trust me, the average quality of our applicants is shit.) So when she finally hired AS a couple months ago, we were all really hoping he'd work out, and we probably cut him more slack than we otherwise would have. Particularly on things like not showing up for his shifts, and not calling to tell anyone that he wouldn't make it in.

Yesterday he apparently showed up half an hour late, without calling to give anyone a heads-up so they could schedule around the delay. When PM confronted him, AS gave some long story about what had delayed him but didn't seem to grasp the basic point that if you are working as part of a team, you have to let the rest of the people know what is going on.

Today he just didn't show up at all.

I called his phone and left a message around 12:15pm, when he was only 15 minutes late. PM called and left a message around 1pm.

Then she fired him.

His alarm code has been discontinued, and when next anyone sees him, we are instructed to tell him he's been fired and we need his key back.

...

The immediate upshot of this is that I ended up working from 11am to 9pm, which is a nine and a half hour shift (plus half hour lunch break), and I am exhausted. I am going to finish eating dinner and go pretty much straight to bed.

Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to brain again.