Residential Life staff meetings so far in January have, for the most part, been utterly pointless: We eat, listen to the hall director read the agenda, take care of minimal business, and are out of there in half an hour feeling vaguely inconvenienced. Yesterday's meeting, though, left me downright pissed off.

A 'winter training' of some sort has been in the works for some time now, but we've never really been given concrete information on dates and times- it's just been held out an ambiguous thing-to-come. The content, too, has been left undetailed; we've heard snitches of information on some workshop sessions and some sort of teleconference on race.

Last night, they finally saw fit to actually give us some details on the whole ordeal- Surprise! It takes place this Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, for five to 7 hours per day. How courteous of them to give us such good advance warning. At first, I thought that perhaps my hall director had flaked out as usual and not told our staff, but I found out later from Victoria, who works directly under the Director of Res. Life, that she hadn't known about it, either.

Great. It's not as if I was just sitting here, waiting for something to fill the last three weekdays of my winter break. Patrick and I still have tons of work to do on our project, and I'm scheduled to work at the bakery both today and Friday afternoon. Another RA mentioned that she had a conflict with the training, and the reply given to her was a very snippy "It's in your contract. You've got to be there." Mind you, we weren't actually given the dates and times in our contract, just informed that we must attend all trainings.

This has thrown a gigantic 10-foot-long wrench in my week, but I think that I can almost work around it. It's just not going to be very much fun. I've started to obsessively pencil in times in my date book during which I can work on the project, and I'm going to have to forgo a few nights of socializing. I just have to keep reminding myself that it's just a week of stress and tight scheduling, and then, well, I start classes on Monday. Lovely.

On a more positive note, I did finally manage to quasi-quit at the bakery. I was laying in bed at 2 am on Saturday night, and realized that I wanted to call my boss' voicemail and quit right then and there. I stumbled out of bed, switched on a light, and did just that. Okay, not entirely- I told him that I wanted to be taken off the regular schedule, but I could still probably work vacations and the occasional emergency shift. That way, I still have the opportunity to make a bit of money sometimes, and I didn't actually have to quit- "Take me off the regular schedule" sounds much nicer than "I quit" and let's face it, I'm a complete chicken in that regard.

Listening to: Ella Fitzgerald, Mack the Knife: Live in Berlin. One of the greatest things about this CD are the little interlude-y things her pianist plays during the applause- very clever.