Timewaster's Guide Archive

Okay, so this is a little off topic, but . . .

There was an article in the BYU paper today about a student who spent over 400 hours indexing and studying the Harry Potter books. He thinks he knows exactly what will happen in book 7 and says he'll be "shocked if his predictions are proven false." He has an e-book with his findings. I'm kind of curious to know if he's right, but not sure I care enough to get the book. I guess you can get it at www.book7answers.com. It looks like one of those "Buy this secret on how to make money from me now . . . for only $100, but for today only, it's on sale for $59.95, but wait, act in the next 10 minutes and you can get it for half price!" and so on. Pretty annoying.

Though, did you know that in the state of Washington, your marriage isn't valid unless you pay the officiator? Makes me wonder how they deal with that at the temple. I keep forgetting to ask, but it makes me curious. Not that I'm in any danger of needing that information for practical purposes.)

I got married in the Seattle Temple, and I never heard anything about having to pay the officiator.

When I was a teenager I got a job at Burger King. I didn't work a lot because I was in sports, so usually just on Saturdays. I forgot to ask for one Saturday off because I had the ACT exam. I called them right when I found out they had scheduled me for that day and told them I couldn't work that morning. The manager said she would try to find someone else and advised me to as well. She alluded to the fact that I would fired otherwise, but not explicitly so I wasn't sure. I tried to find someone but everyone either had the day off for one reason or another, was closing (and since I wasn't 18 I couldn't switch with them for their later shift), or was already working that morning. I didn't know what else to do--I couldn't miss the ACT exam. So I missed work.

Well, they didn't say *anything* to me about it. They didn't schedule me for any hours that week. I thought it was punishment for missing. Then the next week I just wasn't on the schedule. When I went to get my last paycheck, the manager still didn't face me, but rather sent another employee to give me my check.

What's worse is if I hadn't said anything, I could have called that day, pretended to be sick, and not gotten fired, but because I was truthful and had tried to give them as much time as possible to find someone else, I was fired. And then of course not being given the respect of being told to my face I was fired, but having to figure it out on my own, made it even worse.

I'm Simone Deveaux.

Stats: 66 Idealism
            54 Nonconformity
            12 Nerdiness

According to this, I'm not much of a nerd. Ha! I got them fooled. *evil cackle*

This reminds me of when I lived south of BYU campus. One night we heard horrible screaming coming from outside, so my husband ran out of our apartment to make sure someone wasn't being hurt. Down a half a block were some people that had taken their speakers, put them pointing out their window (really big speakers), and were playing some movie or something that had screaming. I think they were having a party. Talk about not being very considerate of your neighbors. Needless to say, the cops were called on them.

As for Des, I am amazed that he's not completely nuts by now. He's not just living a Groundhog Day over and over again but his whole life. eeek!

I didn't get the impression that he is living his life over and over. I got the impression that he lived that small portion over again, but then was back on the island. And from that time forward kept having flashes of things to come. Hmmm.

I remember when I was in school we used to have a thing called the Young Authors competition, but I don't know, since I never entered it myself,  if it was a local competition in our area of Washington, or if it was something larger. But it was a great moral boost for the kids who did enter, because I honestly don't remember anything being turned away for any reason. Again though, this was about 20-25 years ago, I am not sure if the competition even still exists.

I think I may know what you're talking about. I grew up in Woodinville and remember entering a writing contest when I was like in second grade. All the kids in the family did (four of us) and we all won an award. Mine was for "Best Animal Story" (it was about a family who loved their cat and pampered her until they got a kitten and paid attention only to the kitten. So the cat ran away and the family realized she was gone and was upset and started looking for her. When she returned, they were so happy to see her and realized they hadn't been paying attention, so from then on they made sure they gave attention to both cats).

Anyway, seeing as each one in my family who submitted won an award (we even got a trophy with the award on it), I think it was to boost kids' self-esteem, not really a contest. This would have been about 19 years ago.