My suitcase is packed on the floor. Whatever goes in carry-on is still scattered about my bed and my desk. I'm leaving the house around 1 tomorrow, and the plane departs at 5:30. I'm gonna be up late and sleep in to have the best possible chance of not being quite as exhausted when I arrive in London Thursday morning. (And then we go back to Not-London Friday evening. Ahem.)

If I knew I was quitting my job, I'd be gone for a month instead of three weeks. That's what I get for booking round-trip, but it's alright. If I was there for a month, Caby's parents would probably lose their minds. That's six people in that household! And four guinea pigs!

As for this site, I will be bringing my files along, but uh, I'm obviously focusing on spending it with my girlfriend.

I really hope all the incels I used to hang around are still stalking me occasionally. What would prengle think?

For those of you who have access to the testing version of this site, I've gotten all the old scorekeeping pages back up in the underground section and updated (rewritten the text, added the new scores where relevant). I'll link them here for those folks. (I'm still really fond of that Minesweeper page, that's a classic.) Header images are the holdup for the rest of you. I'll get back to drawing tonight, maybe.

Honestly, save for the photo galleries and the little Nobody's Watching tribute (and the pages getting moved to mari.somnol, like the game recommendations and the PS1 hardware reference), the site is pretty close to parity with cammy_v1. I remember back when I used to be so embarrassed by that thing. Felt like such a LARP, I hated using Composer (it might create valid HTML4 Transitional markup, but it's still just <span> soup), I hated how formless all the pages came out, but I just hated how little of an identity it had most of all. It could've been anyone's site.

This feels entirely my own, handcrafted, from scratch. Fun to browse! Fun to look at! I genuinely adore it. I cannot wait to have this done and to turn my attention towards mari.somnol and getting myself a proper, fleshed-out portfolio site, ready for the avalanche of new shit I want to build (see last month's "The long-term Cammy content strategy" journal entry for all that). I want to rewrite all my stories, revisit all the ones I hate and try them again. I want my sites to feel impressive again.

So glad things are moving again, lordy I am. Feeling like 2019 again. Getting back to that.

We're entering the final week before the trip, by the way. By this time next week, I will be on a plane, barreling towards Montreal for a brief layover before I fly out to London. I'm obsessively reading every first-time flyer and TSA guide I can on packing my stuff, guidelines on what to bring and what not to bring, what information to have handy, and just making sure this goes as smoothly as it possibly can.

If I've played my cards right, I will be sleep-deprived in a city I've never been to with a girl I've never been with in person by the 18th. I can't think of anything more romantic, frankly. I will try to take as many DSi pictures as I possibly can for you all.

Basically spent all day in FireAlpaca, because I want to bring you more pages! Here's the first one for the underground section, comparing the outputs of seven different MP3 encoders and explaining why seven programs that all say they do the same thing come up with completely different results. It's a spergy rabbit hole, but hey, there's cute animal people. Everyone wins. (It's one from the old site, but the text has been completely redone and there's a new song being compared. Give it another read.)

If you're wondering what pages are currently started and what state they're in, here's where I'm at:

• The Games That Shaped Me (aboveground): Text is finished, header image is finished. Needs a bunch more flavor illustrations.
• The Albums That Shaped Me (aboveground): Text is started. Very preliminary.
• Cammy's MIDI Stockpile (underground): Text is finished, just needs a header illustration.
• Various other pages from the old site, like the scorekeeping pages or the photo galleries: No header images just yet, probably text will be rewritten. Port jobs are a lot easier than new pages though, so once I come up with something good for Setter to do on them and I draw it, you'll see them not long after.

cammy.somnol is now on the fast track to being possibly my favorite site I've ever built. Spent so long admiring sites like Caby's that have a lot of personality and aren't terribly technical or complex, and now I've got that with my own name on it! Very pleasing. I've also been redoing some of the illustrations and images, relining them, fixing inconsistent Setters, making sure they're at the ideal dimensions like I haven't originally been making them at, so yeah. The polish is starting to build up. I think I got something really good going.

It's only a shame I'm really starting to get into a groove with drawing right before I take this big, long trip, so I'm trying to make the most of this headwind before the 17th. The good news is I'll still have a few weeks of sitting at home while I apply and look for new jobs when I get back, so hopefully I can keep the streak going into July when I come back. (Course, then is Art Fight, and I still have refs to do... I'll fit it all in. I'm enjoying the sprint.)

And the aboveground/belowground update is complete. I held out for months because of that aboveground graphic with Bunny and Setter (drawing my girl! scary!), but then I came up with an even cuter and most importantly simpler way to draw it and now I adore it.

I've actually got site content for you finally! This is the first section I completed for the site, a look into all of my consoles and tech gadgets as the list grows, and it's been done for, again, months, just sitting and waiting to be uploaded. There's nothing quite ready in the underground section just yet, but I already have one page's header (the one on MP3 encoders) lined and drawn, just gotta color it and shade it. Same goes for some more of the aboveground section; pages are written, they just need the graphics.

By no means is this cammy.somnol completed to my liking, but at least it's not embarrassingly far behind like it's been since early this year. I should just be able to do it one page at a time now.

If you're looking for some more art from me, try this kitty girl I adopted from Caby! She drew her based on a Beanie Baby (don't know what her name originally was, I've taken to calling her Miranda), and I just loved the design too much to let someone else have it or to sit unused in a FurAffinity submission. I'm aiming to have her be the mascot to an archives redesign I wanna do later in the year, now that the thing is fuckin' bursting at the seams with content, none of which has a visual guide to browsing it, nor context beyond a version number...

(I've been loving the shit out of this pseudo-watercolor style thing. It makes my stuff look so much more legit, it's cute, and it's so easy. You just shade with the colors and leave the highlights white. Actual life hack.)

Speaking of archives, if you want a little shortlist of cool stuff to see on it, have something else that was lying around that I just finished today! A group blog post on five cool things you should revisit (or visit for the first time, potentially!) on the Somnolescent Archives. Telling you, I have a lot started that's cooking up, and now that it's starting to roll out, you can expect a real nice avalanche from me like old times.

I'm feeling so much freer now that I'm just doing everything again like I used to (oh also no job, that helps). Everything's exciting me again! Jake and Connor are now in Somnol! Eight hour group calls every week! Good times, gamers. We'll talk more soon.

I walked out last night. It was a guy asking my manager "and what will be done about" me after I gave him a stupid answer for a stupid question. And after he loudly and obnoxiously sang in my section for twenty minutes straight. And after I'd already gotten two aggressive customers that shift. I'd already put in my two weeks on the 29th, but I've been coming into work every day wondering who would try to fuck with me that day, a manager or a customer, and $12 an hour is not worth that level of stress.

There was this implication by the end (never to me, of course, over the associate headsets I refused to wear) that I was just awful to all my customers, which is completely unfounded. Most of the complaints they got about me were from me having to tell people no—"sorry, I can't get your grocery cart full of items here, this lane has to stay open for alcohol purchases". "No, you can't buy that much alcohol, 192oz is your limit." Funnily enough, each of these instances happened with no one around but me and the customer, all of whom are cool with lying about low-level retail workers to make themselves look better. In not one complaint was there ever "well I didn't help by giving him shit". It was always my fault. Why does the beer guy still have a job?

No one ever hears about my return customers who like me, who want to buy me drinks, give me money. Beer and wine isn't even on the receipt survey, so they couldn't put in a good word without manipulating the form anyway. No one ever hears about, for example (names and identifying details filed off)

• That dirty blonde girl who always buys the sauvignon blanc Frontera who had a nice five minute chat with me last night about how grueling working retail can be and gushed about how nice Wales is after I told her I was going there
• The old lady who keeps trying to get me to work at her store instead because there's not enough people like me around
• The waitress who gave me $5 or her change whenever she came in, along with a "nice seeing ya hon"
• The couple who'd buy slushies all the time and would tip the "bartender" whenever they did so
• The guy carrying his baby around who'd ask me for beer recommendations and outright bought me a mixed six pack one time because he liked me so much
• The old hispanic dude with his grandkids who was amazed I remembered his phone number for his rewards card (wasn't on purpose, just happened to be one in a million that made it into my memory) and would come in several times a week to buy Fosters and chat
• The other old hispanic trucker dude who always bought Heineken from me and called up HR specifically to put a good word in when he learned I was being harassed by managers
• The black dude with the walker who would talk to me endlessly and would tell me how much good I got ahead of me, who would always give me advice, was amazed at how confident and figured out I sounded for being not even 24 yet

Most of these people, I've seen in the past week. I don't need to dig back into the grey matter for these encounters because they were still happening all the time. No one ever hears about those people, nor do they hear about all the people at my store who thought I carried my department, were excited to see me whenever I entered their field of vision, tried to get me to aim higher than a grocery store clerk because they thought I was too bright for it.

Tell me again customer service back here sucks.

And no, I'm not saying I haven't been flippant to customers before, nor that I'm a perfect employee, but what motivation do I have to try and sweet talk people for $12 an hour and zero reward and plenty of shitty fucking comments from managers about how I supposedly don't like dealing with customers (can you blame me, and you don't either)? Or how about the incident that got me to put in my two weeks in the first place, where a repeat asshole customer was upset I wouldn't serve him, called me names, tried to get other customers to harass me with him, and then I got a half hour-long struggle session about how I didn't handle it right and how a customer buying a $13 six-pack of Guinness (more than I make an hour!) was more important than my dignity?

I went above and beyond for that section, because I'm passionate about what I'm selling and because I buy beer there and I want it to be as good an experience as possible. Sure, they'll replace me. They'll find someone else to work that register, but will that person pull expired beer? Will that person refill the make-your-own-six-pack cooler, let alone with shit people would buy? Will that person wipe down and sanitize the cooler door handles? Will that person consistently show up for work? Even that was not guaranteed with the caliber of people they hired.

I missed one day, by the way, and it was because of weather. Every other day, whether it was slippery roads or being outright sick, I at least came in even though I knew I was leaving early. I was late maybe twice, one of those the other day, and by one minute. Literally exemplary attendance. They used to tell me I was the most reliable associate in the store. So many no-call no-shows—and again, I cannot blame a single one.

I have more stories about how that store fucking sucks, just on the customer end (ask me about the ravioli kit with green spots on it that was out for sale sometime, or how many times we discovered expired dairy left out for sale), but I've made my point. Time to relax in total NEETdom for, I dunno, two months maybe. We'll see.