I left here at 2pm, thinking that would give me just enough time to go to Shoppers, pick up my package, and head directly to work, but no, it turns out that I walk faster than I think I do. The entire walk, out to Queen Street and back up to to work must have taken only an hour, meaning that I got to work with two hours to spare. The first thing Manoah asked when I walked in is if I wanted to start early, because it had been somewhat busier than they expected it to be, and I told him yes. He said he would check to make sure there would be allowance for that, but there wasn't. From there, I pointed out that the dining room really needed to be cleaned, because it was embarrassingly messy (the only normally-clean surfaces that weren't were a few of the tables and chairs), and he held a rag out, asking me to wipe the tables. I curtly told him that if he expected me to do that, then I expected to start early and be paid for it, then sat down, but couldn't bear looking at the mess for very long. Not two minutes later, I got up and set about cleaning up most of the mess - wiping and removing garbage from tables, cleaning the pop station, restocking the condiments, changing the garbages, and sweeping the floor - on my own. A couple guys even came in to eat while I was doing that, but the only words exchanged were "Sorry about the mess, guys" from me, and "Oh, it's okay" from one of them. When everything was clean again, I put the broom and dustpan I had been using away, grabbed a cup, filled it with water, and sat down to play games on my PSP like nothing had happened, and they didn't say anything then either, so... yeah. I got one "thanks for sweeping the floor!" from Manoah when he finally came out to clean up an hour later, but that was it. I will freely admit that watching Kitchen Nightmares exclusively right now has me in the mindset where I think that if I see something I don't approve of, I have every right to tear the person responsible a new one over it, but I really can't expect to be allowed to get away with yelling at somebody at work, like what often happens in that show. Maybe it's for the best that one of my external hard drives with TV shows on it stopped working today.
Specifically, I was copying files to it, and repositioned myself in bed, moving my laptop in the process, which caused the connection to the drive to be lost, from the cords being pulled on, and nothing I've done so far has yielded results other than a message popping up with the title "USB device not recognized". I've completely deleted all USB devices from the device manager, short of the card reader built into this laptop, but that didn't work. I then tried removing the battery and disconnecting the AC adapter for a minute, but that didn't work either, just like reinstalling XP on my old laptop and trying it there didn't, and booting from a boot CD into a basic version of Windows XP wouldn't recognize that there was an external drive plugged in at all, let alone allow me to access the data on it. I have a couple more ideas to try tomorrow, one of which is taking the drive downstairs and hooking it up to the desktop computer, and / or Trish's laptop, if necessary, but until then, I'm glad I bought that second 2TB drive a couple months ago. Did I not have that, I would have far less to watch right now.
On that note though, I think it's time for me to call it a night, because sleep should do well to alleviate some of the symptoms of this illness, and I can't keep my eyes open all that well anymore either. All in all, this has been a weird first day of 2012, but up until I went to sleep last night, things were going slightly better. Xion gave me Chris's MSN address, so I added him to my contact list, and we chatted for a bit. Nothing spectacular, but nowadays, I'm not trying to have that happen. Chris is fun to hang out with in Toronto, so even if we don't talk online again until February, I'm fine with things just as they are. As for that business yesterday surrounding my concerns about Xion's fursuit, maybe I should just toughen up and not let it bother me if worse comes to worse, as I was imagining. The whole "suit as a separate character" thing can only get to it as much as I allow it to, and just like last time I was there, and ran off to hide in Dan's room for a bit so I wouldn't hear or see the movie they were watching, there's no need to explain what they don't ask for an explanation of. That's really all I want to say for tonight though, and not because of the current topic, for reference. I am just to the point of exhaustion, so let's hope a nice, long, restful sleep will kick this cold out of my system, and allow me to make the best of tomorrow. At very least, I would like to go out for a walk in the cold and snow...
