Want to get away...

Maybe I'll go to Munich and drink some German beer to drown my sorrows...hehe

It has just been a horrible week so far and I want to just disappear and hide until everything calms down, including my horrible mood.

To make things worse, there is a huge wildfire on the coast of NC and apparently the wind has changed so that the smoke is blowing our way and there was a fire at a tire factory about 30 miles away from our house, yesterday, so everything smells smoky. This morning, when I got to work in Durham (nearly 60 miles away from home, mind you), I could still smell the smoke in the parking lot. Now, I can not only smell it inside the building but I can taste it (and it's making me want to cough). So, now I really want to run away and hide for a while!

I wonder if the smoke reaches all the way to Orlando (Disney World is a good place to escape, right?) or maybe I'll play it safe and go to Paris to take in the sights and eat some tasty French food.

It's been a rough week...

...and it's only Wednesday.

I've not gotten a huge amount of sleep this week. Some of which is self-imposed due to attending my first WoW raid in weeks last night. I'm hoping I can get to bed at a more reasonable hour tonight and get rid of some of the grumpiness (not to mention the under-eye bags and dark circles) that sleep deprivation is causing.

I'm also getting a little tired of having interviews in the middle of the week. One day per week that feels like a Monday is quite enough, thank you very much...

My interview yesterday went okay, I think. The man who interviewed me was pretty hard to read and it really was a preliminary thing to see who is going to make the cut to panel interview fun house. The position seems interesting and the HR department there does a lot of the same things that the HR department here does. I just can't help feeling that I'm out of my league, though. I really think they want someone with management experience and I have none. Maybe they just won't get anyone else with nearly 10 years of HR experience in that area.

Matthew got a call back for another interview at the store whose mass hire we went to last week. It really is starting to look like he's going to get a job down there first even though he's only been seriously looking for a month (and I've been looking for three).

On the pet front, my dad has been freaking out the last couple of weeks because of how old Buddy has gotten. Buddy is 14 and isn't as spry as he once was but is still a very healthy little boy (except for some heat-induced itchy and dry skin that is going to get fixed today, hopefully) but my dad hadn't really seen him up close and personal for probably five years or so until a couple weekends before Dixie died. We're all also concerned that Buddy may be lonely without his mate because he hasn't been separated from her for very long since he was two.

So, my parents are taking him for a while until this heat wave breaks and so my mom can keep him company during the day (she's at home all day). (Brogan and Angus sure missed seeing him last night). After that, I'm not sure what we'll do. I'd like to bring him inside full-time but he has to be house trained (both pottying and chewing on stuff!) from step one. I'm not sure if I have the mental fortitude right now to deal with training an old stubborn doggy and I'm not sure we have the room with two bigger dogs and the cat...

(Sorry for the rant. I have a lot on my mind.)

A Heavy Heart

My little girl, Dixie, got very sick Saturday while we were out of town. My mom and brother took her and put her in their garage to keep her cooler in the blazing heat that we are having this week but she wouldn't eat (she had eaten Friday). She did this a few weeks ago and we changed her food and she literally came back to life and had more energy than I'd seen in her in a long time.

We went to see her last night when we got home and she could barely move. I forced two tablespoons or so of chicken broth down her mouth with a syringe but she wouldn't eat anything else.

Sometime after 3:30AM, after my brother came home from work, she passed away. She was 12 years old.

I am glad that she did not have to suffer long but I will miss my silly little prissy dog and I'm sure her mate, Buddy, will miss her very much as well. I think I'll even miss her loud, sharp yapping when she wanted something. ;_;

Interview Update

My interviews on Wednesday went ok.

The first one was a little daunting. It was a panel interview with me sitting at the front of what looked like a classroom with four people sitting across from me and questioning me. I was way more nervous than normal but I think it went ok other than that. I always feel bad when I don't have any questions to ask because I know I think the interviewers think that I don't care about the job or the organization. It's just that I go into an interview trying to anticipate the questions that will be asked and there's little room left in my brain to think of any questions for me to ask.

The second thing we went to was a mass hire event for a store that is opening soon in Jacksonville. Both Matthew and I went to complete applications and we were there for 2 hours. We both went through multiple interviews and were drug tested and we felt pretty positive about the experience over all (especially Matthew). Now, it's just wait and see.

As a side note to that event, I've never taken an oral drug test before. Normally, I've had to submit to a urinalysis, but this place gave you a little swab to hold inside your mouth, against your cheek, for a couple of minutes and then you put it into a liquid-filled vial and that was that. Much more pleasant for the HR person that was doing the collections than a urinalysis, I'm sure.

Anyway, yesterday, I got a call from a place I had applied to in Jacksonville for an HR job that I felt was way out of my league (based on the pay scale and the title). I'd only applied because my grandmother had seen it in the newspaper and I knew I'd never hear the end of it if I didn't apply. Well, I now have an interview with them on Tuesday afternoon and I'm still a little stunned by it. I'm refusing to let myself get excited about it or think about it too hard but...whoa!

Pets

Woke up this morning to a Brogan that had been very sick overnight. The smell was so bad that I had to make Matthew do much of the cleanup so that I wouldn't get sick myself. Matthew had to bathe him right away before we could let him go through the house to go outside so I kept Angus with me in the living room. Angus is very attached to Brogan and can't stand for Brogan to be out of his sight. Even though he was playing with me and snuggling with me, he would moan or whine every minute or so because he couldn't see Brogan.

We've been trying to figure out what to do with the dogs in the event that I get a job and move to Jacksonville by myself, temporarily. I know that I'll take the cat with me and probably Buddy and Dixie so that grass can grow where their kennel is now. But, I'm not sure what to do about Brogan and Angus. They can't both stay with Matthew because he can't transport them both in his pickup truck when he comes down to Jacksonville on the weekends. Brogan is Matthew's dog and Matthew refuses to be separated from his dog. Angus is, technically, my dog (really Brogan's dog) and I could take him with me but I'm afraid about separating them. I think that may be our only option, though.

In other news, I have an interview in Jacksonville tomorrow and there is also a job fair that Matthew and I were going to look into. Wish us luck!