I’ve been in the recruiting industry for nigh on 11 years. ELEVEN. GAH! It’s one of those sorts of jobs you just fall into and can’t really get out of. Not that I’d want to get out, of course - the position I’m in definitely has it’s benefits and I love being on my own and having absolutely no one hovering over my shoulder, micromanaging or seeing if I come in late/early some days is a relief. I have a ton of work, it keeps me busy, and I’m damn good at it, but it has it’s moments. *eye roll*

Years ago, I set myself up to receive our own company’s new daily job postings, just to keep myself abreast of what the other offices around my area were recruiting for. I don’t have the need for the daily email, but sometimes some of the jobs that show up on that daily email are interesting!

Case in point, this new one down in Austin, TX.

GAME MASTER

A major video game entertainment company is seeking experienced customer service representatives to serve as contract in-game support representatives for the largest and most successful multi-player online role-playing game. Your main role will be to provide assistance and guidance to players through a typed-chat client. You will serve as the direct link between the company and its customers. Additionally, you will be responsible for in-game customer support, as well as email-based customer support. Able to have a flexible schedule: hourly full-time positions (40 hours per week), and shift hours and days may vary.

REQUIREMENTS

To be considered the right candidate must: Be Flexible; Have reliable transportation; Customer Service Experience; Developed organizational, communication and customer service skills; Demonstrated and accurate typing skills of at least 40 WPM/low error rate; Passions for gaming; Previous experience as a Game Master or online gaming support a big plus, but not required.

Anyone interested? *evil grins*

This was something I’d written up back in December, but never got around to posting, for some quirky reason. I realized I hadn’t printed it out for my recipe book (like I said I would), but it really makes for awesome reading and nostagia. Enjoy, my lovelies…

Last year, my mother gave my sister and me a great, unexpected Christmas gift - a tin full of decadent, homemade pecan pralines, along with a laminated square of paper that had a photocopy of my grandmother’s praline recipe on it, written in my grandmother’s own handwriting. Straight from her recipe vault. Very sentimental. VERY neat gift, and the pralines melted in the mouth. NUMM.

Fast forward to the other day. I got an email from one of my best friends, begging for pecan pralines. Apparently the impending birth of her son is driving her food cravings out of control and she’s now hankering for true Texas pecan pralines, of which she has been told she cannot get in Arizona. “Not good ones”, her associates warned her. So the call went out to her fellow Texans for help.

Now, I’ve never been a connoisseur of pralines and usually would only eat one if my mom made them and I wanted something sweet, so asking me where to purchase pralines was like asking an Eskimo to break out his collection of swim trunks - HEH? So, when I got home, I whipped out the recipe to see what all it entailed…

Little did I realize that I can’t read one stinkin’ word of my late grandmother’s handwriting.

I rang mom to decipher the recipe so I could email it to my friend. Mom’s first comment? “Ignore most of those instructions… let me tell you how I do it.”

 *blink* Alrighty, then!

I’m glad she told me what the recipe card said because I could barely make out the difference between teaspoon and tablespoon, plus my decaying brain thought oleo was shortening… errr, NO. BUTTER. The recipe calls for cream. My mom said I could use evaporated milk, BUT she uses half and half instead. Confuse me much? Uh.. yeah. The only reason I know these are made from my grandmother’s recipe is because my mom used to make them with her and knows the process by heart.  Mom went into great detail over the phone, so what I now have as the recipe is three times as long as what’s written on my grandmother’s recipe card, aimed towards the novice praline maker. Which I am.

SO, ladies and gentlemen, and whoever else reads this - I give you my mom’s version of my grandmother’s pecan praline recipe:

2 1/4 cup of brown sugar
1/2 cup of oleo (BUTTER)
2 tbsp dark corn syrup
1 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 cup cream or evap. milk (HALF AND HALF)
2 1/2 cup pecan halves

**Lay out sheets of foil flat on the counter to put the candy on - mom says that parchment paper works, but sometimes sticks to the candy and the counter, so use what you like**

Combine all ingredients except the vanilla and pecans over med-low heat. (My grandmother’s recipe said LOW heat, but mom is impatient and said that takes too long). Stir just enough until the butter melts. Let it heat up until a candy thermometer gets to the soft ball stage, then pull the pot from the heat. Add the vanilla, then the pecans. With a whisk, gently beat the mixture for about 3-5 minutes or until the consistency changes to the thick, opaque texture of what  praline normally looks like. Mom advised that this part takes practice because when you’re stirring and get to the perfect consistency, you’ve probably gone too far. By this time, the candy will puddle perfectly for the first few pralines, but will harden and get crunchy about halfway through. Best stir until it’s ALMOST to the right consistency in the pot.

At this point, put the pot of mix on a pot holder near the foil/paper and start moving quickly - take a spoon (wooden one if you have nonstick/anodized pots) and start scooping balls of the mix from the pot. Use a second spoon to scrape the mix from the first one and dropping it onto the foil/paper in a blob. It should puddle and start setting up within a few moments. Keep on going, making them about the size of a small biscuit. Let cool before eating (obviously)

So there you have it! I may cut and paste this into a Word document for myself, just so I don’t have to try and figure out my grandmother’s scraggly handwriting if I ever attempt to make these buggers myself.

Post note - Now severely craves pralines in April…

This is amazing to watch….

http://www.maniacworld.com/frozen-in-grand-central-station.html

(had to post the link because I can’t figure out how this stupid site wants me to code Youtube Videos)

At times when my work gets quiet and/or I need a quick diversion to bring my furies down from their proverbial ledge, I play a couple games on MSN. I surf. I used Web Messenger or ICQ2Go to chat to friends (used the online versions because I couldn’t download the actual software).

Came in to work today.. EVERYTHING is blocked. Oh, sorry… let me correct myself. Everything is FORBIDDEN. No chat. No messengers, no game websites, nothing. NADA. Apparently the IT group here went on a rampage over the weekend. *seething*

Now, if this were a small company, I’d be nervous and think that Big Brother was gonna slap my hand and give me a warning. I’m an onsite, technically I don’t work FOR this company of over 4000 people in this one building alone, so my job isn’t in jeopardy… but this just SUCKS. Even the random sites, message boards, and similar  are blocked. My back doors are all blocked. Everything. Any chance I had of using a quiet morning here at work to do a bit of roleplay or stumble through a mind-numbing round of Bejeweled are gone. Dead end.

This just… blows.

On a more pleasant front, Jason and I had a very nice Valentine’s Day. We celebrate on the 13th since we actually met on March 13th, plus that early timeframe ensures we can avoid the rush of crazies. Jason took me to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse for a VERRRRRRY nice dinner. When I say nice, I mean NICE - the waiter always referred to us as Mr. and Mrs. W, I received a BLACK linen napkin instead of a white one (NO LINT! YES!), and the ambience was dark and luxurious. I had the Seared Ahi Tuna sided with cajun spiced crab (drool) and Jason’s Filet was so tender, served on a 500 degree searing hot plate of bubbling scorched butter. Jason has also discovered he likes aparagus with hollendaise sauce (or holiday sauce, as he calls it). Numma! He got me a spa pedicure gift certificate as a gift, so that will be much appreciated in the coming weeks when it finally starts to warm up and becomes sandal season!

My sister and BIL had to put their dog down - she had come down with cancer (the dog, not my sister), and just got so sick that she stopped eating. It was the only humane thing to do. *sighs* But, knowing my sister and BIL, the very next weekend they loaded up their car on a whim and drove all the way from Tx to GEORGIA to purchase a new dog, same breed. *passes out* Those two are the epitome of ‘instant gratification’ people, are they not? I have yet to meet this new puppy, so we’ll see.

And to top off my week, I just got a bachelorette party invite…. clubbing. UGH. I hate clubs. Especially the place we’re going - a ‘duelling piano bar’, where everyone’s drunk, screaming their asses off like teenagers. I hate environments like that.  I’d be trapped in a limo with 10 other crazy, drunk women, who will do all they can to get the bride-to-be utterly smashed off her arse (which won’t be hard to do), and drag her around from place to place until 2 am. Again - not my idea of fun. Jason suggested I just drive myself, meet them at the first bar (the piano bar), then go home when they decide to head to the next club… I think that’s a good idea. A REALLY good idea.

Anyway, I’m gonna get some more work done. This no-gaming stuff on the pc really sucks, but I’ll live. It just really sucks.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the type of post you get when roleplaying online and aren’t proofreading your own sentences for content.

“Its imbeded, when i activate the spell everything on me, or part of me becomes gaseous at the same time (per the spell)”

Damn. I’m sure glad RP chat rooms don’t have smell-o-vision capabilities.

It’s a pretty bad post, however you look at it, but that one line just set me a-giggling when I read it. I read over a few of the poor dude’s previous posts and apparently when his girlfriend demi-god-angel-devil threw her ring at him, it got stuck in his chest. Pretty damn gnarly stuff, if you ask me. *serious nod… still snickering*

One of the key ingredients to role playing is secrets. It’s like poker - never reveal your hand and always keep a trick or two up your sleeve. Example? I created a character on the fly and popped into a room full of vampires. One was a fallen priest, of sorts, and he popped off a few words of French now and again, like Oui and merci, mon ami. The usual. So my little girl character waltzed in and he engaged her in conversation. She countered his sarcastic IC banter with muttering an entire sentence to him in French. Do I speak French? Not a friggin lick, but as I quickly discovered, neither did he. I had used the Altavista translator and posted something about pushing him off the side of a cliff, but when he took my post and tried to reverse-translate it, it came out with something completely different (something about the planet Pluto, if I recall correctly!) Well, the guy went OOC and asked me what my post meant, admitting that he didn’t speak French. VOILA. Little girl trumps the priest-come-vampire. He’ll never know that I was bluffing.

*bows* Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here til Thursday.

If one more person refers to their hands as DIGITS or their eyes as ORBS, though, I’m cracking skulls. “She held the papers in her digits…” HANDS! They’re called hands, ya freak! If you’re holding a rock between your fingers, say it that way. You’re not a robot. You’re not a mannequin or dummy (well….). It’s easier to come up with ten different ways to say “She walked slowly” than it is to refer to your fingers ten different ways, so leave the creativity to the ADJECTIVES, not the nouns, folks. If need be, break the hand up in pieces - thumb, palm, pinky, wrist, nail, etc… Just… UGH.

/rant

In years past, I’ve pulled off playing a male character and had a female sending me OOC messages. Actually, I’ve known several folks that have done that with both genders actually *eyes the Ren*, and it’s amazing how realistic your words can become when you’re portraying the opposite sex. A woman playing a male character, trying to woo a female? The words just seem to come trippingly off the tongue.. fingers, actually… (digits!!) and the female will become putty in the hand. *evil grin* Like understands like.

Gotta jet. I’m at work and keep getting interrupted, so I took my lunch break to whine and bitch and moan here before I get back at it. Ciao.