Upside-Down World

The thing about working in hospitals, is that you're constantly being exposed to all sorts of nasty things. MRSA, Meningitis, TB, not to mention just about every cold and flu making the yearly rounds. So I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised last April, when I first started working in the hospitals and found myself getting ridiculously sick on a weekly basis.

Things have stabilized since, and for the most part, I'm fairly healthy. I take precautions when working (like washing my hands frequently, not touching patients or really ANYTHING, and keeping away from rooms with warning signs on them). But even the most careful person can't avoid a cold when every one of her coworkers has managed to catch it.

And that's where I find myself today; Sore throat, dry cough, woozy, droopy, blah, and feeling like I'm under 66 feet of water (that's two whole atmospheres of pressure!). I'm not imagining my coworkers are hagfish or hairbrushes yet, but I feel the time is close at hand.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

It's official. Today, the people in my position in Northern California are all becoming hourly employees, and therefore, legally "exempt". And all the joys that go with that.



There are a lot of whispers about what this all means for us. Let me enumerate:

Pros
1) Paid commute time! (we were already getting paid for mileage)
2) Shift differential! (not so great for the night shift, which is only apparently getting about 30 cents more per hour than the evening shift)
3) Extra pay for working on national holidays!
4) No more responding to Payroll emails!

Cons
1) Only 30 minute lunches (No more going out for lunch).
2) No combining breaks.
3) We must clock in and out. We've got only 3 phones in our command center and there's as many as 30 of us on duty at a time.
4) No more leaving early if there's nothing to do.
5) No more taking lunches together and the first lunch of evening shift must be taken at 4:20pm.
6) All time worked and commuting time must be signed off by at least 3 people.
7) PTO requests (even PTO that's already been okayed) has to be submitted through a faxed form to several parties who all have to agree it's alright for you to go missing for a day or two.

Seems to me, there's a lot more down than up, but then, I'm a pessimist. On the other hand, it's looking like I'll be getting paid a good bit more, based just on commuting times. Of course, just 12 days from today, we go back to Emeryville, and we don't get paid commuting time OR mileage. Lest you think my company actually LIKES hemorrhaging money.

Replacement Pests

Point of Fact; I have traded the roaches, not for ants (which are actually one of my greatest fears), but for Earwigs, which are relatively harmless (according to wikipedia), but altogether still rather too gruesome for me to allow crawling around my home.

Still, given the choice between one or the other, I'll take the earwigs. Maybe the spiders will take care of them.

Man, I hate ants.

When It Rains, It Pours

This is perhaps the busiest looking comic I've ever drawn. And there's not a ton of movement either, it's mostly facial expressions. So I apologize. It was necessary.



This sort of actually happened. Right after I accepted a job with my current employer, I got a call from Kelly Sciences. Of course, I didn't reject them outright. I waited to hear how much they would pay me (not very well), before declining their offer. I guess it's true that as soon as you're employed, everyone else wants a piece of you.

So that's it. This was my official announcement. I'm staying on the west coast. I have a job, and I'm here to stay. I miss my east coast friends already but hopefully, we'll have plenty of opportunities to visit one another. Now I have to settle in and really make some friends in the area. I don't know how the next 3-5 years are gonna go. I can only hope for the best. Tally ho!

The Prom Dress Poisoning

"I'ma smack you up, B*otch!"

See at Sea the Seal and Sea Lions?

Having spent a Sunday in San Francisco proper, I hope the natives can forgive me, but I find the majority of what I saw of the city (particularly the residential portions) quite unattractive. That being said, I loved the bay, and the Aquarium of the Bay was interesting. Next week, we have plans to head out to Monterey and see the Monterey Aquarium.

Interesting notes from the Aquarium. When we went to buy tickets, the guy behind the counter charged us for one adult, one child. The Aquarium's policies charge child fare for ages 3-11. Eleven! *facepalm. I don't look eleven. 16, maybe. But not 11.

Despite all this, the aquarium was fun, though not even in my top 3 aquarium experiences. Afterwards, we walked along the pier and saw the sea lions lounging on the docks, which was pretty awesome.



You'll often see cartoons and such with a sea lion and they call it a seal. My background in marine science leads me to staunchly defend the difference between the two. This is one of those little things that makes me think that I could probably never be an educator. Or a parent. I get too depressed and frustrated by general idiocy. Also, children are sticky. I have always maintained this. It's incredibly true.

Another Day at the Lab

It's true. Chemists can't keep ANYTHING alive. It's their mission in life to kill everything, whether they know it or not.

Oh, The Geek

I used to get requests in my mailbox to do memes and it'd been a week since I did a comic. To be honest, I don't much care for memes. But then the LOLCat thing came to town and I was hooked. So I decided I might as well do everything all at once. So I memed all last night. My friend Meherbaba requested a comic, so I scraped one together. And in record time too, if you don't count all the stuff at the bottom (I don't want to give away the ending now)...



Yes indeed, this is one big GIF file. And yes indeed, I had to position and tweak every Chewie down there. Frustrating as heck. I really wanted Spock. Or in absence of Spock, Yoda. But apparently, Yoda's not as big a thing in sprite designer world as Chewie. Anyway, he resembles a hamster at least slightly... so it sorta works. Sorta.

ALSO: Obviously, this pegs me to the entire world that I'm a geek. I'm cool with that. And now you know my favorite Star Trek movie (and it really shouldn't surpise those who have read my profile, because, yes, it has whales). However, this is a plea to everyone to not badger me with IMed or emailed requests to know my favorite captain or favorite episode, or favorite doctor or whatever. You're not gonna get a response. Maybe I'll even block you. That kind of stuff is just not that important You're welcome to message me, send me a note, leave a comment, whatever you like, as long as you're not asking me more of the same. And of course, I love it when you enjoy what I've created. But there's a limit to the fanboyish squeeing I'll stand for in a conversation. It gets annoying after awhile.

Fun/weird fact I probably should not admit to: I have a TNG style doctor's uniform in my closet. And also a Starfleet Coroner's Badge (But I swear it's not mine, the badge, I mean).

To see the full versions of the Macros and Chewie icons I made, you can click on the following links:
Whalz
Pwnd
Chewie

The Unfortunate Seasons of being a Girl

Remarkably true...


I rather fear I'm currently stuck in the latter.

Post-Graduation

But then again, it felt that way after every set of finals. True Story

Awhoba?

This is what results when you force an artistic person to watch scientific videos about paramecia

Call me Sneezy. On the Other Hand, Don't

Waking up at 4 in the morning really sucks.



At first I thought I was sick. But then, I realized that coinciding with patterns typical of making my life miserable, My allergies tend to manifest themselves most strenuously at ungodly hours. This has been the case for the past 7 years. But I always tend to forget until springtime rolls around again and tree-sex is in the air. I like to think the trees lurking outside my window are cackling as they watch me sneezing in the dark. It wouldn't be so bad if I could go back to sleep and really really sleep. But I have to get up at 6:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It's hard to get back to sleep. But hooray! I've figured it out. I'll take a claritin before bed and Those trees outside will be cackling no longer! Now it is my turn to laugh maniacally!

MUAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Worth Waiting For?

This comic took a ridiculous amount of time to make. Most likely because every computer I've worked on in the past week has been remarkably finicky. As you can see, work was often a little hectic when I was working in the college computer labs, and our new director had stepped things up a little, so the majority of us were running around like crazy. With clip boards and name badges. Nothing makes me feel more official than a useless piece of pressed wood with useless pieces of paper attached to it.

It was also spring semester midterms time, so many of the people around me were in a semi-dream-like state, which required poking and loud noises to shake them out of it. I, myself am prone to such hallucinations as sleep and watching tv. These things simply do not exist.



Sometimes, we all just want to be appreciated for all the running around we do.

This comic features much smaller lines because everything was scanned in originally at 150dpi and then had to be copied over and shrunk down. I'm not sure I care for the style but at least it's done. I was having so much trouble with the tablet and the Photoshop program at work that I actually did half the comic in Macromedia Flash before I gave up and resolved to figure out what the hell was wrong with the tablet driver.

I still have no answers. But this seems to be a common theme, so I'm not going to panic about it.

Get it? It's a PUN

Planes on a Snake:


Sorry if this entry didn't immediately grab you and throttle you out of your daily stupor. My train of thought is easily diverted these days.

The First Thing that Came to Mind

The thing I loved most about being at college is that for reasons unknown, professors allow you to handle expensive equipment and don't automatically expect you to break it. Reason number two for my love of a life of academia is probably that you're allowed to study some pretty arcane things. I once knew a fellow who is said to have graduated from Hampshire with a major in Oregano of all things. Why oregano? I have no idea. I can't imagine that it was a particularly interesting course of study, but, power to you if you can make it work. 'Course, you're probably not going to be good for much once you graduate, but who among liberal arts students is? I know that I, for one, will be completely useless.

But the topic at hand today is the Scanning Electron Microscope which I took a 5-day class to learn and ever-after shall be able to use said Super-Expensive-Machine (or SEM for short). Aside from the fact that I generally felt that I had no idea what I was doing, I was having a blast. For those not in the know, the SEM is basically a megamicroscope which can see at higher magnifications because it uses electrons, not light to observe specimens.

Friggin' Awesome.

Anyway, I vowed to master this fine piece of mechanical wonderousness and use it for my own EEEEeeevil purposes.



And by evil, I mean looking at tiny, tiny, fish corpses.