This is about as social as I get now ...

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in which i am an awful, snobby person

I feel like such an awful, snobby person whenever I complain about this but I really really can't stand being around the intern.

I just have to make one thing clear, he is the first intern that I have worked with in my 10 years of working with interns that I have just out-right not liked and/or been able to handle being around. I usually get along pretty damn fine with anyone and when I don't particularly like someone I can usually just tune said person out. But it's so hard to tune out when that person is right next to you chomping on ice and kicking back with his feet on the desk.

It doesn't help that he sits right next to me and all day long i have to listen to his sophmoric cell phone conversations and loud ice-crunching. Oy vey with the ice crunching! It makes my skin crawl. Seriously. I have to dive for my headphones at the first crunch or else I feel as though I want to go through the roof.

Oh and the feet on the desk thing, not good either.

It's not just all that but also a definite air of smug arrogance and the basic refusal to take on certain projects because they're just "not his thing."

I mean, come on.

Not your thing????

When I was an intern (and had to walk 10 miles barefoot in the snow to get to work) I pretty much took any assignment/project they gave me because I knew I had to prove myself, to make myself standout among the other interns. Stand out in a good way. You know what I'm sayin'?

Anyway, like I said, I feel bad for this intense dislike but try as I might I can't seem to shake it.

What else?

Well, Saturday we'll go look at our first offical house in the Great House Hunt of 2005....it's a two-bedroom but big-ish (1200 sq feet)....looks very nice from the outside and is on an OK (not great) street in an OK (not great) part of a decen neighborhood. And my decent I mean, no hookers around, no used condoms or syringes. It's listed at $299K. Sunday K. & I went to look at another house in the neighborhood. That one was a 3 bedroom but seemed very tiny (900-ish square feet) and felt like a mobile home on the inside. Nothing wrong with mobile homes folks (the grandma-in-law lives in a very nice double-wide in a senior community) but this one wasn't very nice and I'm certainly not paying $259K for a house that feels like one. One interesting thing though was talking to a woman who lived on the street and had come down to check out the house. She said she'd bought her two-bedroom for $140K just two years ago. Now houses in that area are, of cousre, going for between $259K and upwards of $310K....

Also, my 4O1K withholdings kicked in...ouch....not a HUGE cut - 40 percent of it is before tax - but still, every little bit stings especially when I'm trying to figure out how I'll juggle all the new house expenses. But the point is I KNEW that if I waited until after we bought a house? Well, I'd probably never do it -- or at least not for another year or so. So I was an adult about the whole situation and decided to get used to the deprivation early.

Gah, being an adult truly sucks sometime. Which partially explains why I've been in this kind of crazy pre-house-buying spending frenzy lately. It's like I'm justifying every stupid purchase with "Well, I won't be able to afford it once the mortgage payment kicks in, so I HAVE to get it now.

I know, stupid...but still....

Some things I've bought: