08/25/2009

*taps mike* Hello? Is this thing on?

Well well, it has been quite awhile now, hasn’t it? Sometimes when it’s been so long, I don’t even know where to begin; part of me thinking that the right now is the proper place to begin–the other part feeling compelled to update on months-gone-by, or to rehash old details that haven’t changed at all.

So perhaps a bit of all.

My middle sister, Amanda, was married late in May to her babydaddy, Gerrit. They took their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, and Randy and I joined them there only a few days later. Randy and I stayed with his aunt, which led to some revealing–if not quite all true–stories about what his mother had been saying behind our backs about how much we contributed (or to hear her tell it, didn’t) to the household. This combined with an increasing sense of calm about being away from the city, as well as the general loathing of my job back at the restaurant niggering away at the back of my mind, led me to make the seemingly spontaneous suggestion to move back to Pennsylvania. Randy had very little ties there anyway, as yet still not finding employment.

And thus we returned to New York long enough for me to pick up my final two paychecks which had come in over our vacation, and to pack up our belongings. We now reside at my parents’ house, which is another story altogether. In the interest of succinctness, let us just say it’s not much better than the situation in New York was, but for different reasons. We plan to get our own apartment as soon as we are able, but who knows when that will be as Randy still hasn’t found a job.

I have returned to the place where I’ve gained the majority of my working experience from the time I was 15 years old to this point. I decided to try and remain at least somewhat in my area of study, and secured a position in the Bakery department. There is, if I’m to be completely honest, very little in the way of baking going on in a grocery store bakery. We bake maybe 60% of the breads we sell, whereas the rest are par-baked or simply thawed and shelved. Nearly all of the pastries are frozen and thawed for sale. Even the dough for the bread we do bake is frozen and pre-formed. We simply thaw and proof them before baking. So needless to say, it may be a step down for me. But I am enjoying it, despite the frustrations that ensue from working for a corporate entity. But after two years of working for private entities, I can conclude that it generally doesn’t matter if you work for a private person or a corporation, it all comes down to what whoever’s in charge decides they want, even when your experience and better judgement is telling you that what they want is absolutely asinine, backwards, or damn near impossible.

But such is life.

(On a side note, imagine *living* with that impossible corporate entity, and you’ve just figured out what it’s like living with my father.)

I’ve been reading a lot. In fact, I’m almost out of books. I’ll have to go over to my storage space and dig out some of the books that had been here at the house while I was living elsewhere that I haven’t yet read. And perhaps I ought to renew my library card.