Mystery Keys and the Many Uses of Rolly-Chairs

Important things - I turned in my first MBA application last Friday!! 1 down, 4 to go and I'm almost halfway through #2, I should have it mostly done by the middle of next week I think.


In a related story except actually not, I've been wanting a set of drawers for my cubicle since I started. I began to develop a weird jealousy complex towards all my co-workers who have drawers and spent hours daydreaming about what I would use my drawers for were I to magically acquire some (I also don't have a nifty panel to cover my topmost shelf. Everyone else has one, so they can easily hide their shelf-messes, whereas mine is exposed for everyone to see so I have to keep it super tidy).

Anyways, last month one of the guys from our planning department left to take another position. He had two sets of drawers in his cube and ever since he left, I've been secretly coveting them. Since I don't really know what the protocol is for yoinking other people's furniture, though, I just left them there and would gaze at them longingly every time I walked past.

Last night at around 5pm, almost everyone had gone home, and I was reaching desperation mode with marketing samples spread out all over my desk so that I barely have any room left. It was time. I needed some damn drawers. So I marched down the hall past customer service and over to the now-empty cube and pulled the drawers out from under the desk. As I tried to pick them up, I realized they were much heavier than I originally thought. There was no way I could carry them back to my desk - I would have to come up with a better plan.

I remembered then how my friend Ben and I had been joking around about having rolling chair-iot races at work. This would basically involve pushing or pulling another person around in a rolly-chair and having races...dangerous? Yes. Fun? Obviously. Smart? Maybe not so much. Anyways, I thought if you could push a person in a rolly chair, why not drawers?

With a considerable ammount of effort, I managed to use my knee as leverage to get the drawers onto the chair. I felt pretty accomplished at that point, especially since I managed to do all of this while wearing high heels and dress pants. Nobody saw me except customer service...and they're used to seeing me do weird things...so that's probably best. Now my marketing samples have a home and my desk is infinitely more organized. Yay :)

The best part of all this is that the drawers were not entirely empty when I opened them. Inside the top drawer were these trinkets: a pair of scissors, some staples, white-out tape, and two keys. Keys to where??? Whose keys are they? Am I even supposed to have them???? I sort of hope not...I mean, nobody's needed them for a month so nobody could be missing them right??

Actually I'll probably hand them over to head of planning. But it's fun to dream.

So this morning I have a growing bruise on my knee and a set of keys...and most importantly, drawers. Yay.

Pie + Cool Whip = ???

Welp. The holiday weekend is over - it was everything I hoped it would be, except for not being nearly long enough. Among the things I hoped for (and got) were :
1) good times with my family
2) awkward times with my grandmother
3) turkey leftovers
4) pie
5) some small ammount of productivity

1) Good times with my family were abundant. My sister J was nice enough to pick Matt up from the airport when he decided that it would be nice to get an earlier flight, the arrival time of which coincided with the Thanksgiving Eve service I had to sing in.

2) Awkward times with my grandmother lived up to all my expectations and then some. Among my favorite moments were:
- Repeatedly accusing my mom of calling her an abortionist. Number one,
my mom is pro-choice. Number two, my mom would have been nine years
old at the time my grandma was refering to...it's doubtful she would have even
known what the world abortionist meant. The initial accusation was awkward
enough. More awkward was grandma's continued insistence that it happened.
- Talking about how my grandpa was a "terrible father"
- Debating the relative size of Michelle Obama's ...booty...compared with others.
And last but not least my favorite quote, said to my boyfriend while I was out of the room:
" There's certain things you just can't ask family - like, 'when are you going to get married and have babies', or 'why do you use cool-whip in your pie instead of real whipped cream'?"
(for reference, Matt and I brought two pies containing cool whip to my parents house).

3) yum.

4) Also yum.

5) OK so let's get this straight. A 4 credit class at the U is supposed to demand 3 hours of your time per week on average. However, my instructor clearly states on his syllabus "average work leads to average performance, which in turn leads to average grades." By those standards alone, I should be getting an A+++++++++++++++++++++. Seriously. I don't think you could even PASS doing 3 hours of work, let alone get a C. Every week we have to read 1 case, 2 articles (which are usually pretty long), the entire issue of that week's Economist and write 2 short papers that add up to about 1300 words. I spend probably 5 hours reading and at least another 3 outlining and writing my papers. If I'd actually went back and edited them (which I do not) I'd probably take another hour minimum. What grade am I actually getting? NO FREAKING CLUE. It's on a curve, so I know what my scores are but other than that...yeah. I'm hoping for the grade of "Somewhat more competent than Claire on LOST but not quite as good as Joe Mauer". So it's a fun semester...although it's actually a really great class and I'm learing a lot.

So needless to say after the above rant about my class, it's really fun trying to figure out when to fit in my grad school apps. Luckily, I have Matt, my family and friends and choir to keep me sane :)

Happy almost Thanksgiving!

Life is a little hectic right now. Here are a few of the reasons why:

- I work full-time for a tech. company in Arden Hills, saving the world one hearing aid at a time. Or at least saving our german sales office.

- I sing in my church choir, which takes up all of my Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings.

- I'm applying to grad school - I started out wanting to apply to three and somehow ended up with seven. They are all due sometime between December 17 (U of Maryland) and February 1 (U of MN) and I've barely started any of them.

- I travel a lot.

- For some reason I decided it would be fun to take an upper-level course in International Marketing this semester. It's a crap-ton of reading, and we have a case study and an article review due every week. Super fun.



Anyways I thought about it and I figured, what better time to start another blog??

My old blog reminded me too much of college so I decided to move on and start another one but if you want you can still find it at www.livejournal.com/users/magpie16. Ben and I also started a totally awesome Twins blog (http://heavenlypeanuts.blogspot.com/), which is full of photoshopping and little to no factual information.



So what else to say right now...

I have a lot of work to do on my apps.