Miscellaneous

1) My sunburn swelling went down! I have my kneecap and ankle back in normal possession. :) I'm now in the skin peeling stage, which is gross yet rejuvenating at the same time. I feel like a walking Jergens commercial, advertising the shedding of one tough, caked layer of skin to reveal soft, plush pink skin underneath it. Interesting.

2) I've been a bit frustrated with the paperwork pushers at Nissan. They have repeatedly spelled my name wrong at work (first on my ID badge, and when I went to fix it they screwed it up in a different way, so I had to get it fixed again). They spell my last name as 'Ulmer,' which isn't a huge error, but to me it is glaring! What the heck?! Anyway, with this misstep, my email address at Nissan is now completely wrong, and I've put in a request to have the email name changed, but the request hasn't gone through. Meanwhile, I still need to get my work done and feel mobile through the company, so I'm having to use the erroneous email account. This thus causes anyone who receives an email from me to register my name as the incorrect spelling. As you can see, 'Ulmer' is spreading like wildfire. :( I now have a computer login ID that is based off of this incorrect spelling too.

And yesterday I went to go visit the finance department to get some reimbursement stuff straightened out for initially relocating down here, as well as for living here week to week. The woman I had to work with never met me before, and kept on calling me 'Angela,' which I guess is close to 'Ashley.' But still!! Now I have completely transformed to become "Angela Ulmer," geez.

3) I met all of the other Canton interns this week, by going on a public tour of the Nissan plant. (I did this to get the final check-off of learning my way around the facility.) It turns out that this particular tour session was one where the tour guides invited all of the interns to appear, so it was an intern-tour.

There are six other interns, making me the seventh, at the Canton plant alone. I met five of the six, and no one knows who this last intern is. Male, female? What department? What school are they coming from? No one has seen or heard from this person.

At any rate, all of the other interns know each other well because they are all Mississippi natives and either go to Jackson State or Mississippi State. At the end of the day they go home to their parents' house. Although they didn't know each other at school, they all met and befriended each other at Nissan since they all had their first days of work together. I started two weeks after them.

Alas, there are two computer science interns, one other industrial engineering intern, one HR intern, and one communications/advertising intern. They're all very nice, and I ended up going to eat lunch with them in the Nissan cafeteria after our tour closed.

P.S. I got this really cool magnet as a souvenir from the tour, and its got an aerial shot of the plant from when it first opened in May 2003. I saw this magnet on a coworker's cabinet earlier in the week and fell in love with it immediately. I was actually going to start asking around about where I could get one. Surprise, surprise! I got one on the tour!! :)

4) I'm going to find Brett Favre's house here in Mississippi!!! Joe is coming to visit for the 4th of July weekend (my plans to come back to WI for that week have been cancelled, I'm staying down here for the full shot), and he and I are planning to spend his weekend with me by traveling 3 hours south to get to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Well, we must travel through Hattiesburg to do this, as our chosen gulf-coast town to visit is Biloxi, MS. After doing some researching on the internet, I've located the Favre acreage just outside of Hattiesburg, to the west of our interstate by not more than 10 miles. Joe and I are going to try to at least get to his driveway to take a picture of Favre's new abode before we continue 45 more minutes south, to the coast. :)

I'm very excited for this, because I want to see as much of this part of the country while I am down here. I can't get enough of it, there is so much history everywhere!!! (I'm currently reading a history book that journals the actions of each of the southern states during the Civil War. It's neat to drive past the remains in real life, so I want to read up on it!)

I know there is so much more than my Nissan town to see! I was going to try to go to Biloxi myself, because I want to say I've been to the Mississippi gulf coast at some point during my residence down here. I kid you not, I was looking to book myself a trip this weekend to go on a sort of Bubba Gump Shrimp fishing tour in Biloxi. Except with this, it's an old guy with a two-story ferry boat that takes tourists out in the Gulf to teach them how to fish for shrimp and catfish and lobsters!! It's something funky I want to say I have done - but due to projected rain and thunderstorms this weekend, I canned the idea. :(

Now, Joe is being cool enough to take me -- because we're going to see PUDDLE OF MUDD, my favorite band, while we're in Biloxi! AWESOME how things just fall together!!!


We are also in talks to visit New Orleans when he comes down to be with me for my last week in August. And, on our official move back up to WI, we are going to stop off in St. Louis for me to see the famed St. Louis arch. Before we even make it out of Mississippi though, we're also going to stop in Oxford, MS, to see Joe's alma mater: Ole Miss!

So much traveling....so much of a rush....bring it on!!!!!