It's been a long while since I've posted anything on my phlog! Every so often
it seems like I just sort of forget that it's a thing, and I end up dropping
off the face of the phlogosphere. Between work and the world, it's hard to
keep up with my hobbies. Recently I've been trying my best to finish certain
things that I enjoy but am terrible at actually finishing, like books and
video games. I just read a book called Convenience Store Woman about this
woman whose whole life is basically trying to fit into normal society and in
her adulthood she's pretty much dedicated herself to being a convenience store
worker. It's only around 150 pages or so, so it's definitely not a huge feat
of reading, but I feel accomplished in that I actually managed to finish the
book lol. I'm also about 20-something hours into The Legend of Zelda: Skyward
Sword (remastered on the Switch), but it's been rough trying to finish it
because I will just start falling asleep or getting restless after a short
play session. I'm persisting though! I've been trying to just focus on it for
now before I move on to other games I recently bought, like Neo: The World
Ends with You and Disgaea 6. Fingers crossed I'll make it through it before I
forget the game exists completely and run off to do something else!

One of my best friends and her boyfriend have been living with me for several
months now. She finally managed to escape her abusive parents right after they
wrecked her post-college job plans and so she's been trying to rebuild here
from pretty much the ground up. She still talks to them pretty much just to
keep up a good enough relationship in hopes of keeping them paying her loans
and getting her car back, but they don't have her address or anything to
harrass her with (at least not in person). I'm really hoping she's able to get
back on her feet not just financially but also with her mental health and be
able to go on to grad school soon and succeed. It's been a lot having two
extra people in my home, and I'm sure I've probably shown off more stress than
I should have, but they're tolerating me well enough (lol). I think I'm fine
with not getting married until I'm 100 or so though at this point unless my
future husband has a separate house that's connected to mine. Or a mansion!
Yes, I think a mansion will do, along with about twelve billion dollars at our
disposal. Modest living, I know, but a man must carry on.

I'm up late right now unable to fall back asleep, and it's the first day of
the school year today. I've got to dress up nicely and be stationed at a
school, like a fireman with a firehose, trying to put out the giant fire that
is kids coming back and teachers having surely a thousand technical issues.
It's been hellacious for a good three or four weeks now, considering we were
apparently ground zero for some bug with Dell's server setup that we have and
we lost pretty much every server in the district along with some of our main
switches. A few flickery lights took and made it so we're basically rebuilding
everything, in the middle of an overdue upgrade, in addition to our normal
summer work which involved touching close to a thousand Chromebooks with just
two techs and an intern. Thankfully Brian and Bobby, our sys and network
admins, got pretty much everything up and running after about a week, but
there's a bunch of small leftovers that just aren't coming back, like our
print server, so now we're doing things like resetting everyone's printers
individually and reconfiguring software with old IP addresses and everything
else under the sun as it appears. I definitely never thought working in IT
would be nearly as hectic as it is, and honestly I wonder if other places have
their tech department constantly running around with their hair on fire like
we do (for likely a lot less pay since we're a school). I'm also working on
becoming assistant asset manager, which means trying to learn the ins and outs
of the state asset system and also the nine million year old accounting
software that we use called McAleer (aka Harris NextGen). That's actually been
the easier part of my job recently, though, so I can't complain about it, with
the exception of complaining about McAleer which doesn't allow me to do bulk
imports from a spreadsheet, so *every* single asset has to be put in manually.
I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope that somehow I get a ten million
dollar raise in the next year and that maybe that will keep me more sane lol.

Anyway, I guess I have to go to bed now to wake up on time. Goodnight and
goodbye for now gopher friends!

Edit: Last minute addition! I finally got my degree in the mail from
Millsaps! I graduated with a Bachelor of Science with a major in Creative
Writing! Woo!