Long week at work, no Darkrai, etc.

I was supposed to be off today (Friday) and yesterday, but they called me in to work full shifts (which are 9 hours, but really are only eight hours cause you get an hour for lunch). Oh well. I could use the extra money because I want to try to replace my laptop before school starts again. Fortunately, my check this week (which reflects last week's work) was bigger than my checks have been lately, about $269, which is great. This is probably cause I worked five days last week too. But I didn't work full shifts, and I did that this week. So my next check will probably be bigger. I am making $9.20/hour now, which is pretty decent (considering I started at $7.65). On Sundays, I make a dollar more per hour. Although, with minimum wage in California being $8.00/hour now, I'm only making $1.20 more than minimum wage. I don't know if that is good or bad.

My coworker Katie told me that she makes $13.25 an hour, and is maxed out. She says that happens if you're a department head and you step down, which is what she did (she didn't want to continue being manager after she came back from maternity leave). This means I make $4.05 less an hour than she does, which is not that much of a margin actually. Kinda scary.

As feared in my previous post, I did not make it to Toys 'R Us to get Darkrai. I was scheduled to be off at 3:00 and then they asked me to stay till 8:00. It would've been hard to get over there anyway, even if I hadn't had to stay, since they were only giving out Darkrai from noon to 4 p.m. Also, you needed Mystery Gift accessible in other to receive Darkrai (according to the "how to get Darkrai" instructions on pokemon.com), and my main menu doesn't have a "Mystery Gift" option at this point, which must mean I haven't gotten far enough in the game to get that feature yet. Dang, why couldn't they hand these things out in theaters like in Japan?

Just checked...you have to talk to this interviewer in Jubilife to activate Mystery Gift. I should do that soon, so at the very least I can get Manaphy when I beat Pokemon Ranger, which will probably take a while to do.

I figured out a little trick with Mesprit. If you are lucky enough to do any damage to it when you encounter it (other than KO'ing it, of course), and it runs away before you can catch it or do any other attacks, the damage remains, so that the next time you meet it, it will have the same HP as last time. I managed to get its HP down into the red in one shot using my super-fast Starraptor and the attack Aerial Ace. Now I just need to get my Haunter out of the Daycare so I can have it use Mean Look, which will keep Mesprit there while I try throwing Pokeballs at it (because if I try to attack it again, I'll KO it for sure). Too bad I don't have my Master Ball (I used that on Uxie, after unsuccessfully trying to catch it using a total of 10+ Ultra Balls over at least four encounters).

This is actually not new, this idea. It also appears in Gold and Silver with the legendary dogs Entei, Suicune, and Raikou (none of whom I ever managed to catch in G and S).

Okay I'm fighting off fatigue right now so I better start getting ready for bed. I have a three-day weekend, cause I have Saturday and Sunday off from this week and Monday from next week. Yay! Tomorrow I'm going to the WAVE (a local waterpark) with the Aspie group. I'm looking forward to it.

Good night!