and if everything goes well tomorrow, I’ll be working with my sister soon. At a reasonable pay rate, in a comfortable environment, very nice. I’ve always been good at interviews before. Here’s hoping the mountains haven’t made me so crazy I can’t talk to humans anymore.

Anyhow, I’m tired. I’m gonna post a comic, maybe another short post about … nothing, then go to bed.

Sigh.

I just cancelled my hotel reservations for Comicon. Sadly, I realize there’s no way I will be able to come up with that kind of money before that deadline.

Not really sure how I’ll afford the trip to Florida in September, either.

Oh well. Maybe next year will be my year. You’ll all be wealthy and buy my art and books, right?

Sure.

So, that was an ordeal. I just spent … about three and a half hours of my day trying to apply at one Wal*Mart. The actual application process only took about half an hour, but here’s the rest:

First, I walked back to that first screen-printing place (right across the street from the bus-stop), the one that was friendly, and tried to be persistent but friendly. They still don’t want me, but perhaps they’ll remember me now. That took maybe five minutes.

Then I walked back across the street and waited at the bus stop. Either due to extravagently bad timing or the broken-down bus I saw on the route later, I waited around 40-45 minutes waiting for a bus that runs every 30 minutes. But I got on, rode the 10 minutes to the Wal*Mart, and got off. Then I crossed the Wal*Mart parking lot and went inside to try to apply.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, Wal*Mart uses computers for everyone to apply at. It’s their “hiring center”, and in most Wal*Mart stores, it’s right up front in plain sight. In this Wal*Mart I could not locate it anywhere in the front 1/3 of the store. So, I got into the Customer Service line to ask where it was. About half an hour of people trying to return things without a receipt to a woman standing in front of a 3-foot-tall sign proclaiming no returns will be accepted without a receipt, or after 90 days, I got to ask if they were hiring. She responded that the computer for that was at the back, in the layway department. So, off to the back of the store I went, and there, tucked into a corner of a hole-in-the-wall was the “hiring center” with a young couple working together to apply, chatting in … russian? Something slavic. The male knew enough english to complain to me a couple of times about how many questions it was, and I waited patiently for them to finish.

About ten minutes after I got there, and before they reached the end of the application, they decided it was taking too long, quit, and left. Now, the woman at the Customer Service counter had told me it should take 20-25 minutes to complete, so I sat down and looked at the time. I spent exactly 25 minutes completing the entire process. And I had exactly 18 minutes left on my bus transfer to get back home. So, I calmly walked out of the store and back across to the bus stop. Which took eight minutes.

And I waited for the bus for another 9 minutes, watching the time disappear before I would be forced to walk home in the heat, and then, voila, it was there. Another 10 minute ride back home, and I got off at the same stop as a friendly-looking youg lady who happened to be walking nearly the same route home as I was. We made pleasant small talk, and she suggested that the other Wal*Mart, at 7th St, was hiring, and I should try there. She lives a couple blocks north of here, and works at the quiznos down the way. Maybe I’ll see her again.

Anyway, after the walk home I’d spent about three and a half hours applying at one place. Later today I’ll probably take this completed application down to the Fascinations in the neighborhood and see if I can get a job there. And, like most of yesterday, I’ll work on finding jobs I can do (and get to) in the listings online and apply for them as appropriate. I also spent some time yesterday working on my resume, and it now reflects my work in Pine reasonably well. Maybe I’ll post it later.

In clearing things around to make room for my things to move in, this turned up. If you right-click on this link and choose the “save file as…” or “dowload file…” or whatever equivalent option your browser has, you’ll be downloading a 2.1Mb printable PDF of the image below:

If you don’t know what Bucula is, you can try searching the archives of FYTH, searching the internet, following the recipe, or ignoring this post altogether. For the rest of you, here it is in Janet’s original handwriting.

Just a quick post here.

So, I was out, walking around, stopping into businesses to see if they were hiring, picking up applications, all that stuff, working on a nice heat stroke…

I’d stopped by two screen printing shops and a printing shop to apply, and was about 3/4 of the way around to the third screen printing shop in the area when someone in a car driving by thought it would be clever or funny to throw raw eggs at me as I walked down the sidewalk.

They sped off, flipping me off from their little blue hatchback as I tried to figure out what was going on. Since I was on the right-hand side of the road they came up from behind me and got egg all over my back and side, and I couldn’t tell what had hit me until they were half a mile away. So, no license plate number. I stepped into a convenience store right there and took a couple of paper towels to wipe the bulk of the albumen off me (and buy a diet drink) before walking home.

So, now I’m going to go step into the shower, the start a load of laundry, get dressed again, go back out and try to get a job at the other screen printing shop in the area. Then I’ll come home and … I don’t know, figure out about dinner, maybe.

Sigh.

Who does something like that? Why? Middle of a Monday, and you’re out egging pedestrians in the high heat of the afternoon? What the heck?