Does anyone know of any good Admin or copy writing jobs in the East Bay or San Francisco? I, ahem, know someone who is looking for such a thing and would be most grateful for any leads. Please email me if you think of anything!

Life is strange. My favorite person in the office is abruptly no longer working here as of Monday. I'm so depressed, but also furious. It's the busiest time of the year, and we definitely don't need to be short-handed; it's stressful enough around here as it is. I think she'll be ok, so I'm not as worried about her as I might otherwise be, but she was one of the few things that made my days bearable. I feel like my spirit is being broken, slowly but surely, in this place. I am not sleeping at night, not well. I wrote a furious ranty journal entry at 3am Monday night/ Tuesday morning but then wisely kept it a personal entry.

Ok, enough of that.

Tim often urges me to open Xmas presents early, and so Friday I shook until I found what sounded like a computer game and opened the package. He gave me the Sims Deluxe Edition. He helped me download Buffy and Spike Sims skins (not to mention the naughty ones in nothing but a corset and/ or strap-ons) so I have the Slayer household, which is pretty cool. Of course, I re-created myself and put myself in a couple of different houses (no, I'm not wearing the corsets or strap-ons); my favorite house -- the one where I was supposed to get to stay home while two other adult Sims went out and had the day jobs -- is the most tragic. SimHeather was doing just fine, studying cooking so that the hard working Sims she lived with didn't have to cook after a long day at work, and not a week into it she caught fire and died. Died! If this isn't symbolic of how things have been going for me lately, I don't know what is! What's worse is that it's my favorite house -- the other two surviving Sims have great jobs so I get lots of money to buy cool Sim things, but every so often my ghost will arise from the urn and haunt them. Depressing. I re-created myself AGAIN and put the new SimHeather in a bachelorette pad across the street, but even though she's been proposed to several times by one of the surviving Sims in the cool household, she won't move in. Argh! Of course, if a ghost of myself was haunting my boyfriend's house, I probably wouldn't want to move in, either. Perhaps I should sell off my ashes, but I can't bring myself to . . .

ANYway, I'm pretty sure you don't want to hear about my SimLife. I'm finding the same thing that I found the last time I was into the Sims -- I'm taking better care of them than I am of myself (at least, this was true over the weekend, when I spent much of my time absorbed in the game). Tim, who claims not to like these kind of games, became entranced when he realized he could make a completely freaky neighborhood, with SimSpawn, SimJohnConstantine, SimTheCrow, SimMexicanWrestler etc.Hee! He's so cute when he plays, especially when he has the above sitting around his SimDollHouse, giggling and playing with dolls. We haven't had any fights over the disc yet, though there's been some whining -- I think we're going to have to buy Tim his own copy soon, just to be safe.

That's been my life lately. Hating the days, playing Sims, loving Tim. After a weekend of virtual living through my Sims, I'm considering trying a new yoga studio soon, took a long walk on Monday and have been generally good about eating reasonably healthy and light lately. Trying to actually take good care, balance my energy bar with my social bar with my hunger bar with my hygiene bar etc. I just need to balance my days out, get that big part of my life straightened out, and I should be good to go. Too bad it's such a big thing to fix, is all.