My Awesome Summer Job

"I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity." - Eleanor Roosevelt

Who wouldn't want a summer job where your boss lets you ride (and pushes you!) on the flatbed cart on the way to pick up boxes from a distant room, or where you get to fly down a long, wide hallway on a wheely chair at high speeds? A summer job where your boss pays for your lunch and not only gives you free chocolate and caffeinated beverages, but goes out of her way to bring them to you? A summer job where you can come in on whichever days you feel like it and work for as many or few hours as you want?

Yes, I'm working for my mom. Just helping with inventory and organization and updating databases and stuff. (Or rather, listening to audio books and blogging on the job.) It's not official, because there's no space in the school's budget for me, so I'm earning minimum wage out of her own paycheck.

One of my projects is to go through all of these old science kits people ordered over 8 years ago and never used. I'm supposed to sort all of the stuff out, organize it, and then make lists to keep track of all of it. Today was just taking all of the supplies out of the boxes, spreading some of it around on the floor, and putting some of it in cabinets.

One of these kits is based around "Food Chemistry." So naturally, we found 8 year-old granola bars, marshmallows, and freeze-dried apples. At least that's better than the 30 year-old vegetables my aunt found in the back of my grandma's freezer a couple summers ago.

We've quit working on that for the day, but Mom still has another half hour to put in, so I'm here messing around on the few websites the school's SmartFilters allow me to access. (Which means I can't get on Facebook to respond to the messages my email tells me I have, and I can't get to a proxy server with which to bypass the Facebook filter because proxies come with their own metatags that the filter can detect. Grrr.)

It's funny-- she's always way nicer when I'm the only kid at home. She even agreed to play Diablo 2 with me. (It should be noted that my mom is actually pretty good at that sort of game, even though she doesn't play much. Apparently my parents played Age of Empires together before I was born, and she had a level 60+ gnome warrior in WoW back in 5th grade. Yeah, my mom is cool.) I can't imagine what it'll be like for my youngest sister once the other two of us are in college. Ha.