So...this isn't your typical Christmas fodder. You can save it for some other day if you're not up for loose ends today; I seriously don't mind.
And I did start this on the 24th. I don't know why Blogger wouldn't save the draft properly.
_
O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
2012 has been a big year for transition, from the kickoff in January ("A third year of slogging through adjuncting, and a third consecutive semester of having to live off my parents to greater or lesser degrees? Thanks, but I'm going to try temp work") to deciding with Albert in late February that I was going to be the one to move (although, honestly, I think I remember the moment when I really started surrendering to that probable eventuality, and that'd been back in, like, October 2011), to the temp job from late March to mid-October (my first forty-hour-a-week job that lasted longer than fourteen days!), to the late-October leaving of Binghamton. Now, almost two months into trying to become a New Englander, I've interviewed for a (very-possibly-a-long-shot) full-time, tenure-track job at a community college (technically not as faculty, but as something not unlike it in some ways). This either means that I'm headed, against my expectations, back into tutoring and teaching and some other things, or I'm going to still be jobless in January with about three weeks to decide what to do before my New York State insurances become void.
So it's also been a big few months, if not year, for self-absorption. I'm sorry about that, if you've noticed. Thus the carol above: I think it was the first one this season to actually make me feel like I was addressing God, instead of just coasting (or, that downfall stemming through my many consecutive years in singing groups, performing) through the carol, or the hymn, or half-listening to the sermon, in the midst of everything else I was trying to think about and process. I don't feel a lot of day-to-day anxiety, but I certainly have been distracted by a lot of metaphorical shiny (and not-so-shiny) objects - as well as sometimes some self-righteous crankiness.
Plus, it's been poignant to finally enjoy time with my immediate family more, just as I'm moving away. And it's hard not to want to protect them, too, except that I keep not even trying to do that even to the extent that I can. For 2012 was also a year in which my heroin-addict cousin died of an overdose, another cousin allegedly strangled his wife to death (I don't know whether the trial's yet gone through), another cousin had her husband separate from her and had some family stuff go down, and an uncle had a completely unexpected mental-illness episode (never happened before) that his wife (my aunt) appears to be using as an excuse to separate from him. This is the year in which I began to see (even without any big immediate reason to do so) that someday my parents really will die, and as they celebrate thirty-five years together and shop together for new wedding bands (which looked so sweet until I found out that my mom doesn't actually necessarily want them, and she and Dad don't really agree on how the buying process ought to go, and they've been trying and failing for months now to commit to some decision), I think of all the other things in the extended family that have fallen apart over the past year or two, and of how apparently no family without God's grace is either safe from or equipped to rightly handle tragedy, and I wonder how close we're coming to some edge. I have wondered on and off, for some time now, how I could even begin to witness to an extended family who hardly knows me, really, and shows no sign that they have any idea, in some cases, that they're not Christians already, or what Jesus and following him are really like. I look at the swath of brokenness, and I am overwhelmed by my complete inability to form words around everything in my head, and I fall guiltily, damagingly silent.
Which is not, of course, to say that nothing good has happened this year. Of course it has. Leah and I reconnected. I got a full-time temp job. I had a really good Easter and a nice birthday. My parents moved to a house I like, and we all celebrated their thirty-fifth anniversary. Ife got engaged. We had a gorgeous autumn. I got to go live near Albert. Jessica got married, and Albert and I saw Ken, Julie, Dave, and Christa for the first time in (depending on whom you're talking about) years or ever. Joe and Andrea had a baby. Lots of other stuff, too.
So my world has been pretty big, and I often haven't done a great job of handling it. But I'm trying to trust God, and I'm interested to see what happens.
Merry Christmas to my new friends from property management, both the ones I managed to give nicknames to (Ben, Jake, Vince, Cal, etc.) and the ones I didn't (like Yosra, whom I pretty much wanted to give the alias of Shoshana even though that doesn't reflect her background). And to Lisa, Janell, Sarah M., Abby C. (wish I could have gotten to know her better before the move!), Patricia, Mona, and Ryan. Merry Christmas to sponsor children and especially to military members everywhere - if Erik is still in Bahrain, as it appears he is, I hope his holiday is especially bright.
May God grant all of us peace in the new year.
12.25.2012
12.15.2012
In Progress
Because I don't know what to say on the other blog (ugh, if I ever successfully update it again) about this, and am trying to decide whether I can really suitably post anything about such things at all.
Grace is not her real first name, but it is part of her name.
The last Saturday before Thanksgiving, Albert and I got in his car on that day's sunny midmorning, he in a slightly mismatching suit jacket and dress-pant combo, I in a weirdly-cut black skirt (a little help from the internet suggests that it may have had a fishtail-style hem) that was the only semi-suitable one I had clean, plus a normal dress shirt. We remembered things to read beforehand, but I'd forgotten a snack. I consoled myself that, if all else failed, I could fall back on a cough drop.
We were heading to the funeral of someone we'd never met. Grace, older sister to two church friends of ours who're slightly younger than we (I think M. is twenty-five, and R. a few years younger than that), had died during the previous week under complicated circumstances, and attending the service (besides the card we'd somewhat belatedly sent) constituted more or less the extent of what we really knew to do for them. M. and R. belong to a tricky friendship class - friends towards whom you feel warmly, but with whom you haven't yet hung out in a formalized way; the ones you sit with at church functions or have been around for some weeks in a Bible study, but have never yet had over for a game night, or gone with for a post-church lunch. Albert also knew their mother from working with her for a fairly short time, but didn't really know her very well, either.
We arrived early at the church that Grace had attended - early enough that the only people up in the sanctuary were the members of the worship team. Among them were M. himself, who's good with a guitar, and Heather, who with her husband Adam (who I think was running sound in the booth) had hosted the Bible study at which I'd met M. in the first place last summer. I was maybe a little surprised - and yet not - that M. had chosen to sing. I might have wanted to myself, in his place; the trouble would have been actually getting my body to do it. When Heather Rivera had died back in college, it was one thing to practice a certain song or two with Chamber Singers for the memorial, another to actually sing without choking up.
But when the service started some time later - the sanctuary full by then, with chairs in the aisles because the pews weren't enough - the worship team sang true. By that time Albert and I had read the program; he'd noted how very close in age he and Grace had been, born in the same year.
Jenny, another friend of ours, had joined us at the near end of the pew, and had apologized in advance at the likelihood that she'd cry. I'd replied that I had tissues; eventually, as the service progressed, she did take some. So, a bit, did I - probably some combination of the dry-faced brothers (reminding me of a memorial long ago, John steady before Fernando's sobbing girlfriend - some people do tearless grief so bravely that it adds to my tears) and trying to imagine the unimaginable, what it would be like for my family to lose my only sibling.
About all I remember of the singing was the odd tableau of a swell of song, the thought of how we looked from right to left along the pew: Albert singing full-voiced, worshipful through sadness; me singing when I could around my tight throat; Jenny silent, either unable or not wanting to give voice to the moment at all.
Grace's body had been taxed by more than the diabetic coma that ultimately overcame her. She'd also struggled with an eating disorder and with heroin addiction - both, as I understand it, contributors to what had happened - and there was probably still another factor in the case, this one very private (the family does not know that Albert and I know), over which I can only draw a curtain.
With deaths like that, the family has a choice to make, from a wide variety of possibilities, about what story it wants to tell about the one who's passed. And I say with deep respect and admiration that Grace's family and pastor told hers vulnerably, evenly, and well. They traced out Grace's personality - her authenticity, her stubbornness - and the directions she took when, years ago, she was slammed with juvenile diabetes and her parents' divorce within months of each other. They recounted difficulties, hope, progress, relapse, and many things to love about her. Among the paintings (her own work) displayed along the altar, the sermon and eulogy sketched and colored her in: a troubled follower of God, fighting against a body of death.
Christ was her hope, and is her family's. They, respectfully but undeniably, said so, compassionately, assuring the gathered (as M. did) that they weren't trying to capitalize on the moment, but doing their best to give a reason for that hope. It was a gutsy move, and the right one.
After the service, Albert and I waited in a long line, which wrapped around the corner and down the stairs, to the fellowship hall. When we got there, the family was there to receive us all, and Albert and I tried to say helpful things before gratefully having the meal. Albert spoke to Grace's mother, proofreader to proofreader, praising the eulogy's content - offering, if she wanted it, a brief chance to be a craftsworker for a moment, instead of a bereft parent. We hugged the guys and offered to hang out sometime if they wanted to get out of the house. They haven't taken us up on it, but we hope it was some comfort to know that they could.
In the days since then, we've seen M. at church things - he's back to worship team, back to talking to us after the service. He seems to be doing all right. It's hard to say; we know him only so well.
But today, almost a month later, twenty-seven people were gunned down; twenty children's families are left to, perhaps, stare at a pile of presents and sob; and again we're all trying to find something to say, something to somehow encompass a dizzying expanse of heartache, find a way to resolve the unresolvable. How do you speak to someone of a perfect Answer when the Answer is so big you don't always know how He works? I don't dare say as much as I should, but some things are so true that I do want to say them - here, at least - about floods and tsunamis, about drug-laced tragedies, about the slow desolation of so many people I should love so much more truly: what I said to J. last month, both her divorced parents in the hospital from separate accidents, her own marriage in pieces, the only words that seemed to be of use to her, of all the ones I said: this is a good world that was broken. And what Reverend Matt wrote this afternoon about the shooting: this is why Jesus came, and this is why he will come again.
Grace is not her real first name, but it is part of her name.
The last Saturday before Thanksgiving, Albert and I got in his car on that day's sunny midmorning, he in a slightly mismatching suit jacket and dress-pant combo, I in a weirdly-cut black skirt (a little help from the internet suggests that it may have had a fishtail-style hem) that was the only semi-suitable one I had clean, plus a normal dress shirt. We remembered things to read beforehand, but I'd forgotten a snack. I consoled myself that, if all else failed, I could fall back on a cough drop.
We were heading to the funeral of someone we'd never met. Grace, older sister to two church friends of ours who're slightly younger than we (I think M. is twenty-five, and R. a few years younger than that), had died during the previous week under complicated circumstances, and attending the service (besides the card we'd somewhat belatedly sent) constituted more or less the extent of what we really knew to do for them. M. and R. belong to a tricky friendship class - friends towards whom you feel warmly, but with whom you haven't yet hung out in a formalized way; the ones you sit with at church functions or have been around for some weeks in a Bible study, but have never yet had over for a game night, or gone with for a post-church lunch. Albert also knew their mother from working with her for a fairly short time, but didn't really know her very well, either.
We arrived early at the church that Grace had attended - early enough that the only people up in the sanctuary were the members of the worship team. Among them were M. himself, who's good with a guitar, and Heather, who with her husband Adam (who I think was running sound in the booth) had hosted the Bible study at which I'd met M. in the first place last summer. I was maybe a little surprised - and yet not - that M. had chosen to sing. I might have wanted to myself, in his place; the trouble would have been actually getting my body to do it. When Heather Rivera had died back in college, it was one thing to practice a certain song or two with Chamber Singers for the memorial, another to actually sing without choking up.
But when the service started some time later - the sanctuary full by then, with chairs in the aisles because the pews weren't enough - the worship team sang true. By that time Albert and I had read the program; he'd noted how very close in age he and Grace had been, born in the same year.
Jenny, another friend of ours, had joined us at the near end of the pew, and had apologized in advance at the likelihood that she'd cry. I'd replied that I had tissues; eventually, as the service progressed, she did take some. So, a bit, did I - probably some combination of the dry-faced brothers (reminding me of a memorial long ago, John steady before Fernando's sobbing girlfriend - some people do tearless grief so bravely that it adds to my tears) and trying to imagine the unimaginable, what it would be like for my family to lose my only sibling.
About all I remember of the singing was the odd tableau of a swell of song, the thought of how we looked from right to left along the pew: Albert singing full-voiced, worshipful through sadness; me singing when I could around my tight throat; Jenny silent, either unable or not wanting to give voice to the moment at all.
Grace's body had been taxed by more than the diabetic coma that ultimately overcame her. She'd also struggled with an eating disorder and with heroin addiction - both, as I understand it, contributors to what had happened - and there was probably still another factor in the case, this one very private (the family does not know that Albert and I know), over which I can only draw a curtain.
With deaths like that, the family has a choice to make, from a wide variety of possibilities, about what story it wants to tell about the one who's passed. And I say with deep respect and admiration that Grace's family and pastor told hers vulnerably, evenly, and well. They traced out Grace's personality - her authenticity, her stubbornness - and the directions she took when, years ago, she was slammed with juvenile diabetes and her parents' divorce within months of each other. They recounted difficulties, hope, progress, relapse, and many things to love about her. Among the paintings (her own work) displayed along the altar, the sermon and eulogy sketched and colored her in: a troubled follower of God, fighting against a body of death.
Christ was her hope, and is her family's. They, respectfully but undeniably, said so, compassionately, assuring the gathered (as M. did) that they weren't trying to capitalize on the moment, but doing their best to give a reason for that hope. It was a gutsy move, and the right one.
After the service, Albert and I waited in a long line, which wrapped around the corner and down the stairs, to the fellowship hall. When we got there, the family was there to receive us all, and Albert and I tried to say helpful things before gratefully having the meal. Albert spoke to Grace's mother, proofreader to proofreader, praising the eulogy's content - offering, if she wanted it, a brief chance to be a craftsworker for a moment, instead of a bereft parent. We hugged the guys and offered to hang out sometime if they wanted to get out of the house. They haven't taken us up on it, but we hope it was some comfort to know that they could.
In the days since then, we've seen M. at church things - he's back to worship team, back to talking to us after the service. He seems to be doing all right. It's hard to say; we know him only so well.
But today, almost a month later, twenty-seven people were gunned down; twenty children's families are left to, perhaps, stare at a pile of presents and sob; and again we're all trying to find something to say, something to somehow encompass a dizzying expanse of heartache, find a way to resolve the unresolvable. How do you speak to someone of a perfect Answer when the Answer is so big you don't always know how He works? I don't dare say as much as I should, but some things are so true that I do want to say them - here, at least - about floods and tsunamis, about drug-laced tragedies, about the slow desolation of so many people I should love so much more truly: what I said to J. last month, both her divorced parents in the hospital from separate accidents, her own marriage in pieces, the only words that seemed to be of use to her, of all the ones I said: this is a good world that was broken. And what Reverend Matt wrote this afternoon about the shooting: this is why Jesus came, and this is why he will come again.
12.10.2012
So As Not to Leave You Hanging
I am, in fact, currently working a short-term temp job at a decent place that pays good money. So there was something in not getting the other job after all. And by "something" I mean "this is a lot better."
And now, having internet-ed my evening away and then some, I am going to bed so I can get up and work tomorrow.
And now, having internet-ed my evening away and then some, I am going to bed so I can get up and work tomorrow.
11.27.2012
The Ten-Point-Four Percent
I probably technically don't belong to it, seeing as my permanent residence is still in New York. But tonight it feels like I do.
A word on the job search: ugh. Not that all days are like that, but some days feel productive and hopeful, and then some days you realize that even the national retail and food chains to which you've applied don't want you. Some such days, you find yourself trying to convince a staffing-agency employee to give you a job for which you'd have to drive about an hour each way just to do what sounds like basic receptionist work (phones, greeting, filing), for a four-to-six-month period, which would kill your getting a permanent job anytime before spring unless this place hired you on for good, but if they did, even splitting your apartment location equally between job and boyfriend would put you too far from both. So, all things considered, it's probably not a job you should take, but out of impatience and temporary despair you jump at it, even though you've still got one temp agency to follow up with today and another to go meet with tomorrow. The job came up on the employees' mailing list, and you call for it less than thirty minutes after the e-mail's been sent, possibly in time to be the first to volunteer for it, which should give you the edge.
For the record, since she's openly concerned about the long commute for so little money, the staffing-agency employee won't give you the job. She puts you off, not saying no, but presumably waiting for someone more suitable to volunteer. This is without your even having bothered to alarm her with the news that, in addition to living an hour away, you're also overqualified, a possessor of a Master's degree.
Not that you can really blame her. You'd be skeptical in her place - can this girl really get there on time every day? Is she really not going to bag it after two weeks, after she gets sick of the commute? Is she really going to do that for four to six months and not ditch out for some other job? After all, presumably a certain percentage of people doing temp work are doing temp work for a reason, because they can't get a job on their own, maybe because they've got something to hide.
And so you do, in most job-application contexts these days, but it isn't alcoholism or a past forcible termination: it's a Master's degree and a failed first career.
A word on the job search: ugh. Not that all days are like that, but some days feel productive and hopeful, and then some days you realize that even the national retail and food chains to which you've applied don't want you. Some such days, you find yourself trying to convince a staffing-agency employee to give you a job for which you'd have to drive about an hour each way just to do what sounds like basic receptionist work (phones, greeting, filing), for a four-to-six-month period, which would kill your getting a permanent job anytime before spring unless this place hired you on for good, but if they did, even splitting your apartment location equally between job and boyfriend would put you too far from both. So, all things considered, it's probably not a job you should take, but out of impatience and temporary despair you jump at it, even though you've still got one temp agency to follow up with today and another to go meet with tomorrow. The job came up on the employees' mailing list, and you call for it less than thirty minutes after the e-mail's been sent, possibly in time to be the first to volunteer for it, which should give you the edge.
For the record, since she's openly concerned about the long commute for so little money, the staffing-agency employee won't give you the job. She puts you off, not saying no, but presumably waiting for someone more suitable to volunteer. This is without your even having bothered to alarm her with the news that, in addition to living an hour away, you're also overqualified, a possessor of a Master's degree.
Not that you can really blame her. You'd be skeptical in her place - can this girl really get there on time every day? Is she really not going to bag it after two weeks, after she gets sick of the commute? Is she really going to do that for four to six months and not ditch out for some other job? After all, presumably a certain percentage of people doing temp work are doing temp work for a reason, because they can't get a job on their own, maybe because they've got something to hide.
And so you do, in most job-application contexts these days, but it isn't alcoholism or a past forcible termination: it's a Master's degree and a failed first career.
11.18.2012
Quick, Before it Flickers Out
From probably some of the same fine people who brought you #PoetryImprovedByCustard, please go check out #MiddleEarthBands.
11.13.2012
A Little News
Well, I've moved out of Binghamton. Technically speaking, so far I've only moved to my parents' house, which is in Onondaga County in New York; theirs is my new permanent address. But the idea, of course, is ultimately to move to Rhode Island or Massachusetts. I do have a potential job interview coming over the horizon; we'll see if that comes to anything.
In the meantime, I've started a public blog. Now, don't worry, the beginning of that one is definitely not the end of this one. After all, there are just some stories and opinions that are for one's close friends, not for one's acquaintances (or for any random person with a friend who links to a friend who links to a friend who links to my new blog). Besides, after ten years here, it'd be lame to shut this down.
So if you'd like my new URL, great - you can get it through Facebook, starting tonight, or I'm happy to e-mail it to you or something. But if you'd sooner not, that's fine. I'll do my level best to keep a better posting pace, and probably you'll get some deleted scenes as well.
Now it is my intention to either apply for a job (might as well, whatever happens with the position mentioned above) or clean the bathroom or some other room. Cheerio!
In the meantime, I've started a public blog. Now, don't worry, the beginning of that one is definitely not the end of this one. After all, there are just some stories and opinions that are for one's close friends, not for one's acquaintances (or for any random person with a friend who links to a friend who links to a friend who links to my new blog). Besides, after ten years here, it'd be lame to shut this down.
So if you'd like my new URL, great - you can get it through Facebook, starting tonight, or I'm happy to e-mail it to you or something. But if you'd sooner not, that's fine. I'll do my level best to keep a better posting pace, and probably you'll get some deleted scenes as well.
Now it is my intention to either apply for a job (might as well, whatever happens with the position mentioned above) or clean the bathroom or some other room. Cheerio!
10.12.2012
Seven Quickity-Quickity Takes: This-Could-Almost-Have-Just-Been-One-Long-Post Edition
One: So it turns out that the quickest way to shut down my blogging is to have me promise to address a certain topic the next time I write. Part Deux of the tenth-birthday blogging (which happened, oh, nearly FIVE MONTHS AGO) will eventually be addressed. Or not. But not this time, either. Sorry to keep unintentionally lying to you.
Two: I'd like to talk about this before it actually happens, so here we go: I'm moving to Rhode Island in a couple of weeks. Well, technically I'm moving to Syracuse, to my parents' house, but I'm spending up to the first three months of that in Rhode Island to find a job. But the idea, at least, is that I'll find a job and then the move to Rhode Island will be finalized and carried out. Since so far I haven't been able to get such a job through searching from New York State, I'll be staying with Albert's mother and looking in person.
Three: So how do I feel about the move? Excited, and also kind of sad, but mostly it doesn't feel quite real yet. I mean, fifteen days from now I'll have left Binghamton. But work and life have been so full of other things that the past month has really been more about focusing on one day or week at a time. I don't think it'll be real until I've left work; next Friday will be my last day. And then...I'll have to pack in earnest. But I'm hoping to start at least getting my books off the shelves before then.
Four: By the way, I've pretty much come full circle at the job. Having started during the last week of March as the interim maintenance coordinator, I was moved around mid-to-late-June to "special projects" (defined as, "whatever my supervisors wanted done that nobody else really had the time or specialized knowledge to do"), and then even did a stint in September as, essentially, the interim communications coordinator. But the guy they hired in maintenance after me has had to miss a lot of work for a lot of reasons, and last week they went ahead and let him go. So, for the closing two-and-a-halfish weeks of my position, I've been and will be back in maintenance, training my new successor (who's been with the company for a long time and theoretically will be around for a while), although I'm also still helping the new communications coordinator a little bit, too. I'm actually glad to end in maintenance, as (believe it or not) it's my favorite of the three, for various reasons I won't go into here. It'll be really tempting to log into Field Force, of a quiet day in Rhode Island, and see what Ben, Jake, Vince, and Cal are doing. I should probably tell my bosses to change the password.
Five: I am also trying to do those last-chance things. I may run off to Ithaca this weekend for one more glorious trip to the farmers' market, the Friends of the Library book sale, the Cornell campus, and Collegetown Bagels. I may even buy myself some kind of t-shirt or something. But I'm also going to try to get to Kopernik Observatory, which is doing public events this weekend. I'm likely to do that even before I do Ithaca.
Six: Things that will happen soon after I arrive in Rhode Island: (1) Halloween (I'd like to be a hobbit again, but don't think I'll be able to get it together); (2) Election Day. Judge me all you want, but my plan so far is to deliberately and unapologetically miss the deadline for getting an absentee ballot. Nyah-nyah.
Seven: It's getting cold, which means at least two things: that I don't want to hang out downstairs (I'm always bad about doing my dishes on time, but in cold weather, the chill in the kitchen is a big reason why), and that I'm suddenly way more into tea than I...dang! I just remembered, writing this, that I left some tea on the counter to cool, and - ::tasting:: - now it's pretty much lukewarm. Oh, well...let that be a lesson to me!
Off now to go do stuff. For more takes, go see Jen!
8.10.2012
Seven Quick Takes: Early-Exit-from-Work Edition
(I got out of work at 2:45 today because of a follow-up visit to the nurse practitioner who sees me for primary care - you'll soon be able to guess why. By the way, I do still intend to write up the Part II of my Tenth Blogiversary celebration. Hopefully that'll be soon, but...well...)
One: This deserves to lead the quick-takes pack. Praise God - that's all I have to say about it.
Two: To some personal business: as I've certainly mentioned off-blog, I developed last week what the urgent-care doctor who saw me on Wednesday night diagnosed as acute gastritis (even though I seem not to have gotten it via any of the more obvious ways, which tend to involve food, drink, or substances that I don't consume on a regular basis). What's that like, untreated? Basically, a lot of severe abdominal pain, sometimes with nausea, et cetera...even when all I was trying to do was drink water. It didn't start out as bad as that, but that's basically where it ended up. I've been taking proton-pump-inhibiting medication (that is, stuff that shuts my stomach-acid pumps down to some extent, although apparently not to such an extent that I can't digest things) and a fair amount of liquid store-brand antacid. (Question: if mints are supposed to aggravate gastritis, why do they use it to flavor antacid? Unless, I suppose, it's just artificial flavoring.) Also, for the record, a low-acid diet is way harder than it looks. Thank the Lord above for bananas, in-season watermelon, saltines, and chicken broth. If not for them, eating almost wouldn't be worth it at all.
Three: Things I would like to be eating again soon: spaghetti and sauce (tomatoes are too acidic), pizza (tomatoes, plus I'm still a little iffy about milk/cheese/etc.), anything involving chocolate (prohibited because of potential acid production), cereal with milk (milk and I apparently haven't made up yet), and basically anything containing more than nine grams of fat (not because it's precisely prohibited, but again, just because my digestion's been all funny).
Four: Speaking of food, today I definitely saw a maintenance record (one not of my own making) that read, "Show[ed] building to burgers." At first I thought it'd been a typo for "burglars," but fairly quickly realized that that definitely couldn't have been it, either. Upon further consideration, I think Cal must have written, "Show building to buyers" - the building in question being for sale, if I'm not mistaken - and the person making the electronic version, D. or J., must have misread his handwriting, which isn't always the clearest.
Five: So 2012 won't go down in history as the year in which I watched as much of the Olympics as I would have liked, but I have caught some. Congratulations to Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings! I hadn't followed their Olympic stuff before, but I'm so glad they got their three-peat.
Six: I've been reading a lot of Dorothy L. Sayers's letters (I'll probably finish the volumes of her letters before I finish those of C.S. Lewis, even though I started Lewis's a couple of years ago and only have one volume - albeit a very long one - left), and if I could just quote some of them in full on this site, or any other, I might. However, since I can't, I'll say that a lot of problems in thought and rhetoric, and probably education, that I thought were fairly new (only since my parents' generation, say) have actually been in full force for a few decades longer at least. So that's a little troubling. I'll also say, a little less depressingly, that she takes the idea of work very seriously, and has some ideas about what work one should or shouldn't be asked to do in the service of Christianity that differ from, say, C.S. Lewis's opinions. It was interesting to see the two of them argue it out in letters (well, mostly her, since his reponses are only given in excerpts), especially as I wonder if they aren't both partly right. Rather than try to summarize the whole debate here, you can ask me if you're interested.
Seven: It's my brother's birthday, so I'm off to text him. I'm also going to give him a birthday present when I see him next weekend, but what it will be, I do not now have an idea. Wish me the best on that one!
6.15.2012
You'll Notice I Didn't Specify the Weekend on Which I'd Celebrate
Since I've been at this blogging thing for ten years now, there are two things I'd like to do. This will probably be Part I.
First, given that in my last entry I linked to my first post, in which I, seventeen years old at the time, introduced myself, I should reintroduce myself a decade later.
My name is not Laurel, of course, and all three of my regular readers know it. (By the way, I believe I also started with three regular readers. Those were, of course, Zinni, 'Nanda, and Daf, none of whom read now.) There's no reason I couldn't use my real name, especially as I tend to use my friends' real names when I refer to them here. But somehow it just doesn't feel right. Call it an alter ego, I suppose - or, as I thought of it when younger, an imaginary twin.
I still look back on my high-school self with some admiration and fondness, even as I also giggle a bit over how sometimes I'm so good with language and sometimes I use the same slang word a gazillion times with no trace of irony. I still have some of the e-mails I wrote back then, especially to Zinni and 'Nanda - how I had such a memory for details of events and conversations then, I don't know, except to say that I was way better at getting enough sleep, and usually better about writing things up fewer than twenty-four hours after the fact. Also, of course, adolescence just feels so different - everything's in more intense focus.
As for the ensuing years, I think my biggest change has been with my relationship to God. I mean, I've been a Christian since sometime in the fourth grade, but that wasn't really challenged in any significant way until, say, college, when I found through trial and error that there really is no doing Christianity halfway. Among other things, I was dumb enough to date two boys who weren't really Christian (which, honestly, almost surprises me, because I knew, I knew better...but sometimes I am the kind of person who's too afraid to do the hard thing, tries to get around it, and makes things worse that way), and blessed enough that those boys were really honorable and that they and I continued to be friendly after the eventual breakups, which, essentially, were my fault because they proceeded directly from my eventually being unable to deny that the religious differences between us were too great. (Sometimes, even with boys whom I didn't go out with, they got greater: whereas some girls worry that they've turned boys gay, I have to worry that I contribute to turning boys atheist.)
I also, sophomore year, had to do more extensive reading up on apologetics and suchlike (and not for the last time, mark my words: it happened again, to a still greater degree, in grad school), and discovered to my delight that, while Christian doctrine may sometimes have to settle for a tie in an intellectual argument, it never loses (and really, most of the time I think it flat-out wins). I also went through a long space of time in which a lot of things happened (not even psychological, really - emotional, though, certainly, and to some extent physically), and the biggest thing I learned was that God really will rescue His people, as many times as necessary.
But on another note, I've also found that, while I can make better rhetorical cases than before, I've become typically too cautious to risk backlash about them. Everything political and religious is so polarized right now that I'm so tired of debate, so tired of arguments, so reluctant to be (inevitably) misunderstood and judged accordingly, and so hyper-aware of how easy it is to sound like that Christian (both to Christians and to non-Christians), even when risking my sounding like that Christian would be the most genuine and loving thing for me to do. I'm actually more conflict-averse than it looks like (for all I can get lecturey, I tend to only do it with people with whom I feel safe, and with the expectation that the person will take it either silently or without open scorn). One thing it's done, to be honest, is that it's made this blog pretty watered-down. I should probably think hard about fixing that.
There's been another big change over the past decade, too: having to transition from being someone whose life is largely organized around school to being someone whose life is largely organized around a career...although clearly, to this point, to call my jobs a "career" overstates the matter. In plain truth, for all college's virtues, it did not help me (though some amount of that was certainly my own fault) to figure out what I wanted to do, or even what could be done by an overscrupulous bookworm who'd spent all her school years with fairly unrealistic ideas about what the non-student world was like. So I went into teaching college English because that sounded at least potentially pretty decent, and then found that it wasn't; despite being academically successful, I'm extremely bad at the simple practical task of making myself do the hard thing on my own time and self-imposed deadlines. In other words, the actual experience of having to teach classes of students scared me too badly, and I didn't have enough help in it (though, thank God, Drs. Kinney and Strong did everything they could for me); though I learned things (some of them academically, many more in other ways), I wasn't willing to do what it took to really be successful. Besides, the compensation and prospects are terrible, and I'd prefer not to live off my parents' money for the rest of my life.
I'm not a career-oriented person, the way my father is. Like my mom, interpersonal relationships are just more important to me. And I need a starting point that doesn't involve more schooling. So right now I'm working a job I don't love, though it's certainly interesting, and I'm looking, in this terrible economy, for an ethical job I can see myself working, and I'm trying to be realistic. The trouble is, it's hard to be realistic when your carrying a Master's in English overqualifies you for a lot of things and your lack of experience underqualifies you for a lot of other things. (Seriously, people: don't ever get a graduate degree unless you mean it. If you're not committed to that career field for life, please think twice, and then think a third time, because gone are the days, assuming they were ever here, when one degree too many might be a good thing.) So I guess I'm trying to mix realism with the sense of this-is-who-I-am-and-I'll-wait-for-someone-to-take-a-chance-on-me that one can feel more genuinely when, like me, you're afraid to feel constant dread again about your job (seriously, it's so much better for the world that I'm not a teacher anymore), and when one has the luxury of generous upper-middle-class parents.
And just because I haven't brought up Albert doesn't mean I haven't wanted to. It's just that some places are places to get sincere and gushy about someone, and then some places are the blog of which your boyfriend is one of only three readers. But yes, for the record, well over half of the past decade has also been shaped by him, as Lewis-style First Friend and then as half of our couple. The most telling thing I can offer is this: I'm working to put Rochester, Alfred, and Binghamton about six hours away from myself, and I'm doing it by choice. Next time I'll close out the celebration. For now, echoing so many of the past thousand-plus entries here, I ought to go to bed.
First, given that in my last entry I linked to my first post, in which I, seventeen years old at the time, introduced myself, I should reintroduce myself a decade later.
My name is not Laurel, of course, and all three of my regular readers know it. (By the way, I believe I also started with three regular readers. Those were, of course, Zinni, 'Nanda, and Daf, none of whom read now.) There's no reason I couldn't use my real name, especially as I tend to use my friends' real names when I refer to them here. But somehow it just doesn't feel right. Call it an alter ego, I suppose - or, as I thought of it when younger, an imaginary twin.
I still look back on my high-school self with some admiration and fondness, even as I also giggle a bit over how sometimes I'm so good with language and sometimes I use the same slang word a gazillion times with no trace of irony. I still have some of the e-mails I wrote back then, especially to Zinni and 'Nanda - how I had such a memory for details of events and conversations then, I don't know, except to say that I was way better at getting enough sleep, and usually better about writing things up fewer than twenty-four hours after the fact. Also, of course, adolescence just feels so different - everything's in more intense focus.
As for the ensuing years, I think my biggest change has been with my relationship to God. I mean, I've been a Christian since sometime in the fourth grade, but that wasn't really challenged in any significant way until, say, college, when I found through trial and error that there really is no doing Christianity halfway. Among other things, I was dumb enough to date two boys who weren't really Christian (which, honestly, almost surprises me, because I knew, I knew better...but sometimes I am the kind of person who's too afraid to do the hard thing, tries to get around it, and makes things worse that way), and blessed enough that those boys were really honorable and that they and I continued to be friendly after the eventual breakups, which, essentially, were my fault because they proceeded directly from my eventually being unable to deny that the religious differences between us were too great. (Sometimes, even with boys whom I didn't go out with, they got greater: whereas some girls worry that they've turned boys gay, I have to worry that I contribute to turning boys atheist.)
I also, sophomore year, had to do more extensive reading up on apologetics and suchlike (and not for the last time, mark my words: it happened again, to a still greater degree, in grad school), and discovered to my delight that, while Christian doctrine may sometimes have to settle for a tie in an intellectual argument, it never loses (and really, most of the time I think it flat-out wins). I also went through a long space of time in which a lot of things happened (not even psychological, really - emotional, though, certainly, and to some extent physically), and the biggest thing I learned was that God really will rescue His people, as many times as necessary.
But on another note, I've also found that, while I can make better rhetorical cases than before, I've become typically too cautious to risk backlash about them. Everything political and religious is so polarized right now that I'm so tired of debate, so tired of arguments, so reluctant to be (inevitably) misunderstood and judged accordingly, and so hyper-aware of how easy it is to sound like that Christian (both to Christians and to non-Christians), even when risking my sounding like that Christian would be the most genuine and loving thing for me to do. I'm actually more conflict-averse than it looks like (for all I can get lecturey, I tend to only do it with people with whom I feel safe, and with the expectation that the person will take it either silently or without open scorn). One thing it's done, to be honest, is that it's made this blog pretty watered-down. I should probably think hard about fixing that.
There's been another big change over the past decade, too: having to transition from being someone whose life is largely organized around school to being someone whose life is largely organized around a career...although clearly, to this point, to call my jobs a "career" overstates the matter. In plain truth, for all college's virtues, it did not help me (though some amount of that was certainly my own fault) to figure out what I wanted to do, or even what could be done by an overscrupulous bookworm who'd spent all her school years with fairly unrealistic ideas about what the non-student world was like. So I went into teaching college English because that sounded at least potentially pretty decent, and then found that it wasn't; despite being academically successful, I'm extremely bad at the simple practical task of making myself do the hard thing on my own time and self-imposed deadlines. In other words, the actual experience of having to teach classes of students scared me too badly, and I didn't have enough help in it (though, thank God, Drs. Kinney and Strong did everything they could for me); though I learned things (some of them academically, many more in other ways), I wasn't willing to do what it took to really be successful. Besides, the compensation and prospects are terrible, and I'd prefer not to live off my parents' money for the rest of my life.
I'm not a career-oriented person, the way my father is. Like my mom, interpersonal relationships are just more important to me. And I need a starting point that doesn't involve more schooling. So right now I'm working a job I don't love, though it's certainly interesting, and I'm looking, in this terrible economy, for an ethical job I can see myself working, and I'm trying to be realistic. The trouble is, it's hard to be realistic when your carrying a Master's in English overqualifies you for a lot of things and your lack of experience underqualifies you for a lot of other things. (Seriously, people: don't ever get a graduate degree unless you mean it. If you're not committed to that career field for life, please think twice, and then think a third time, because gone are the days, assuming they were ever here, when one degree too many might be a good thing.) So I guess I'm trying to mix realism with the sense of this-is-who-I-am-and-I'll-wait-for-someone-to-take-a-chance-on-me that one can feel more genuinely when, like me, you're afraid to feel constant dread again about your job (seriously, it's so much better for the world that I'm not a teacher anymore), and when one has the luxury of generous upper-middle-class parents.
And just because I haven't brought up Albert doesn't mean I haven't wanted to. It's just that some places are places to get sincere and gushy about someone, and then some places are the blog of which your boyfriend is one of only three readers. But yes, for the record, well over half of the past decade has also been shaped by him, as Lewis-style First Friend and then as half of our couple. The most telling thing I can offer is this: I'm working to put Rochester, Alfred, and Binghamton about six hours away from myself, and I'm doing it by choice. Next time I'll close out the celebration. For now, echoing so many of the past thousand-plus entries here, I ought to go to bed.
5.17.2012
Happy Birthday To...
...this blog! Today marks a decade since my first post (there've since been over 1600!), written towards the end of my eleventh-grade year. (Re)read it at your own risk, although it wasn't bad for an introduction to who I was at barely-seventeen.
Like so many childhood birthdays, though, this one falls during the week, but the party (so to speak) won't take place until the weekend. I'll try to do something special to mark the occasion in a couple of days, but tonight I'm just back in the house after a long day, and if I don't go to any kind of get-together for Katy's birthday (since today is also her birthday) or write a cover letter for a job, then what I'd probably better do instead is go to bed.
As for you, dear readers, may I say today that it's been a pleasure to let you in on some of my thoughts. You've made good company - thanks!
5.11.2012
On My Kicking Back and Possibly Going to Starbucks, Bubble Tea, CyberCafe, or Similar (Book in Hand)
I think eight hours of work, plus some two to three hours of job-application work (with a net result of two completed applications, both for positions on what we could call my A-list), is enough for one day, don't you?
I hope - and also think - I've gotten a little better over time at applying to things.
5.08.2012
Somewhere, Dave Ramsey Has Just Facepalmed and Doesn't Know Why
So-o-o, I kind of didn't keep good enough track of my checking account, so my paying my latest health-insurance bill a little earlier than usual (which I had thought had been responsible) looked last night to have possibly blown up in my face when I logged onto my bank's online personal-banking function and saw that I had all of about $40 in my checking, and knew that probably the check I'd written for $219-and-change (what can I say: cut-rate state health insurance, for all its virtues, is emphatically not as cheap as employer-provided health insurance) had been cashed earlier that day, though it hadn't come up on the site's log yet, and though my available-balance still showed in the black.
So I hurriedly transferred several hundred dollars out of my savings to meet it, and hoped for the best. Now my "bank balance" still read $40 or whatever, but my "available balance" (tracked separately, it's the amount of money you actually have, as opposed to the amount you had, as far as the bank knew, by closing time) was enough to cover it and then some.
Tonight, I went out and finally bought a pair of dress shoes, since, seriously, my black pair (which I liked very much and am sorry to lose) has basically come apart, and I grabbed a couple of other things at Target. It was fine, because I was pretty sure I had enough even assuming the check money had been taken out of the available balance. But just in case, and just to see what had happened with that check, I logged on again tonight.
No problem with the available balance - the check had posted, the debit had been made (plus a couple of others), and my "available balance" had covered it with some left over.
But the bank balance, for the first time I've ever seen it do so on any checking account of mine, began with a minus sign. -$151.58, to be exact. The check, sure enough, showed up on the page this time, but was dated to yesterday.
So we'll see what happens if you're overdrawn according to the bank balance but not the available balance. This could be interesting.
Seriously, though, my insurance company needs to start taking debit or something, because then the worst that that would happen would be that the transaction would get denied (which is different from a check bouncing, and carries no monetary penalty, at least unless the party who's billing you is allowed to charge you a late or penalty fee themselves for that, which they probably are, but I'm pretty sure the insurance company wouldn't), and then they'd just call me to fix it, and that would be fine.
But primarily, of course, I should probably pay more attention next time.
So I hurriedly transferred several hundred dollars out of my savings to meet it, and hoped for the best. Now my "bank balance" still read $40 or whatever, but my "available balance" (tracked separately, it's the amount of money you actually have, as opposed to the amount you had, as far as the bank knew, by closing time) was enough to cover it and then some.
Tonight, I went out and finally bought a pair of dress shoes, since, seriously, my black pair (which I liked very much and am sorry to lose) has basically come apart, and I grabbed a couple of other things at Target. It was fine, because I was pretty sure I had enough even assuming the check money had been taken out of the available balance. But just in case, and just to see what had happened with that check, I logged on again tonight.
No problem with the available balance - the check had posted, the debit had been made (plus a couple of others), and my "available balance" had covered it with some left over.
But the bank balance, for the first time I've ever seen it do so on any checking account of mine, began with a minus sign. -$151.58, to be exact. The check, sure enough, showed up on the page this time, but was dated to yesterday.
So we'll see what happens if you're overdrawn according to the bank balance but not the available balance. This could be interesting.
Seriously, though, my insurance company needs to start taking debit or something, because then the worst that that would happen would be that the transaction would get denied (which is different from a check bouncing, and carries no monetary penalty, at least unless the party who's billing you is allowed to charge you a late or penalty fee themselves for that, which they probably are, but I'm pretty sure the insurance company wouldn't), and then they'd just call me to fix it, and that would be fine.
But primarily, of course, I should probably pay more attention next time.
5.04.2012
Self-Promotion v2.0: One-and-a-Half Job Applications Submitted
It would have been two, but I felt like one of them might be more likely to notice that I'd sent it close to midnight, and I didn't want to look funny doing that - or make a mistake because I was getting tired.
I kind of want to go eat pancakes with Ife and Lisa, and to tell Jerry that he should apply for my job here once I get a job in New England, but I think I'll hold off in favor of, oh, reading and sleep.
Tomorrow: birthday celebration with family, which most likely means introducing most of us (including myself!) to grilled pizza, and introducing everyone else to the niceness that is the nearby gelato place.
Also, I should probably start a public blog, just to have something on hand to prove to potential employers that I really am as good as I say with computers. Well, not just for that; also because it'd be nice to give my mom something to read.
5.02.2012
4.26.2012
I've Messed Up My Circadian Rhythm Again Somehow
Seriously, I haven't taken any naps this week, let alone long ones that would throw off my sleep schedule. ...On the other hand, how much caffeine is in probably-too-many mini-sized chocolate bars?
Anyway, this report is to say that probably one reason my whole first wave of job applications failed is that, if tonight's research into the matter provides any indication, my resume had major flaws. I've rewritten much of it and hope that that will help.
Also, according to this diagram, which I think is fairly clever, do I even qualify as a nerd? I'm a little afraid that I might be just a little too socially apt. Isn't that an unusual thing for an honors scholar to say.
4.18.2012
On InterVarsity at Buffalo
I needed to hear part of John 16:33 tonight. Here's most of that verse:
In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
4.16.2012
Interlude #1
I got home from grocery shopping (which I did after youth group) this evening around 9:30, only to have Katy appear, calling a perky hello to me out of the darkness. I (hopefully politely) turned down her polite offer to help me put away groceries, and she ended up coming inside to fill a large watering can (where had she left it, such that she could get at it so quickly? In the garden?) at our tap and leave it on our porch so that tomorrow she could water Carrie's and her garden boxes, which are in our front yard (Katy's landperson must not be so into his-or-her tenants doing their own gardening, but Carrie, of course, owns this house).
It feels just a tiny bit like something out of a '90s Nickelodeon sitcom, a la Clarissa Explains it All or something, where suddenly the neighbor randomly shows up and advances some kind of plot or subplot. I'm going to assume, in the absence of any other evidence, that a garden box full of (among other things) sprouting arugula will stay in the "subplot" category. But hey, you never know.
It feels just a tiny bit like something out of a '90s Nickelodeon sitcom, a la Clarissa Explains it All or something, where suddenly the neighbor randomly shows up and advances some kind of plot or subplot. I'm going to assume, in the absence of any other evidence, that a garden box full of (among other things) sprouting arugula will stay in the "subplot" category. But hey, you never know.
4.15.2012
Introductions, Part 1: Fix-Its and Clean-Its
It occurs to me that, if I'm going to tell you about things that happen at work, you could use a few more details about us. Here's a little color.
To the extent that you haven't figured it out already, either from context or from talking to me in real life, for about three weeks now I've been serving as the interim maintenance liaison for a company that manages properties, mostly rental properties. That is, we're usually not the landlords per se; usually we're the people that local landlords hire on a long-term basis to help them run their apartment, rental house, mobile home park, or what have you. I think that entails a variety of things - certainly we oversee stuff like lease signings, evictions, and I think some record-keeping as well. And, of course, building maintenance goes through us, which is where the maintenance staff and I come in. Their tenants call us, rather than the owner, when their toilets are broken or their ceiling leaks or they lose heat or power.
I'm about to employ a bunch of pseudonyms here, so don't take any of these names as corresponding to their given ones.
We have four main maintenance guys on the payroll - or at least four with whom I work, since apparently there are two others whose jobs are more specialized (construction, for instance) and whom I won't see at this time of year. Two of them, Ben and Jake, do most of the repairs. Ben is the cornerstone of our maintenance department: smart, skilled, hardworking. Jake, though older than Ben, is something of an apprentice - there're only some things he can do yet. I don't know much about either of them outside of their work selves, but Ben is married to Tamara, who works for our (well, "our" is kind of a strong word, as you'll see) professional-cleaning staff; more on them in a minute.
Cal, the third main maintenance guy, doesn't really make repairs (well, come to think of it, he does change locks); instead, he does the janitorial-type jobs - if you need something dirty done, from hauling out garbage to seeing whether there's a dead body in one of the apartments (for real, he had to go check for one this week - thankfully, the tenant whom we'd been afraid might be dead was still alive), he's your guy. He also does the messenger and errand-oriented jobs - lets appliance-delivery staff into vacant apartments, takes written notices out to tenants, shows up to represent us for evictions, and all kinds of things like that. It's easier to know about him as a person because he's in the office more, and is more talkative. I know that he's in his early forties and that he likes, probably among other genres, music from the 80s.
Vince is our main painter, busy at this time of year on what're called "make-ready" jobs, where we prep a property for anyone who's moving in. He's happy-go-lucky, low-pitched and a little drawly of speech - a little like how old, friendly dogs talk in animated movies. He seems to work hard and enjoy himself fairly well, and he likes to joke around and doesn't seem to get angry easily.
Besides them, we have two contractors we work with a lot. Bart gets called a couple of times, basically every day, to go do something that our guys don't do (like remodeling jobs) or don't have time to. He stands out from the main staff both because he's a little younger (the others are in their forties and up) and because he's clean-shaven (even to his shaved head), whereas all the main maintenance guys sport facial hair. Besides him, there's Ash; I've met him briefly, but so far all I know is that he, too, is younger, and that he's got a voice that to me says "surfer dude."
I also ought to mention Clem - I've never met him in person, but he's in charge of maintenance for certain properties that we manage under a sort of subdivision of the main company. I'm told he's a Quaker and that he's in his seventies. Over the phone, he's got a high-pitched old-guy voice (a lot like Mike Hamar's from The Red Green Show) and sounds lively and opinionated.
There's also a whole cleaning staff, mainly female (although there's a guy who cleans carpets and suchlike) - they're not maids, though. They actually work for a small separate company run by my immediate boss, and they're employed mainly for make-readies, so as far as I can tell, they clean vacant properties rather than ones with active residents. The aforementioned Tamara, married to Ben, appears to be the head employee; I've met a couple of her assistants as well.
You may have noticed that I've given all the maintenance guys one-syllable names. This is on purpose. That's exactly how it is in real life: even the guys whose full names are multisyllabic go by single-syllable nicknames. Thus far I have met no exceptions, unless you want to count my bosses, to the extent that they're considered maintenance (though really they're many other things).
My upper boss, the company's owner, speaks a little disparagingly (though not when they're around) of the maintenance guys' intelligence sometimes. I don't agree with him, as I'm about to detail, but it probably stems partly from the job logs they turn in, where they detail their work every day. Cal's handwriting is almost impossible to decipher sometimes, Jake can't spell worth a lick, and even Ben tends to give his whole report in one long fused sentence speckled with apostrophe-essed plurals. And Vince, for all his graceful handwriting, does tend to use quotation marks to mark emphasis:
Paint Complete
"3 Bedrooms"
** Note: Stairs at Lot 16 are broken - "Safety Hazard" **
It's an imperfect office altogether, and we're imperfect, quirky people. Maintenance is no exception: Cal leaves gaps in his timecards where he's been reading a newspaper on the job. Bart, rather than ever starting a job and just working through to its finish, takes on about twenty of them per week and then stretches them all out forever, telling you one day he'll get there tomorrow, and then three days later, with no trace of irony, that he's about to start. Jake probably does willfully misunderstand things once in a while, knowing that it'll lessen his workload a bit if he doesn't ask too many questions. Ben often doesn't make doing inventory any easier for me than he has to: despite my knowing basically nothing about tools and parts, he doesn't go out of his way to specify, or to estimate prices, though sometimes there're four parts in the system under the name he's given, and all of them costing different amounts of money. And to them, I'm probably a bit of a headache myself - not to be trusted yet to ask the right questions of tenants over the phone; unfamiliar with property locations (which makes a difference when I have to decide where to send them next); unable sometimes to hierarchize the relative importance of this job versus that; having always to double-check things with the owner, which takes up everybody's time; maybe even a little too polite to them over the phone.
But I like them, and I admire what they do. I'm quick at typing - quick with my fingers - but poor with my hands, usually not very good at things that are manual, mechanical, dirty, or rough. Even in the kitchen, for all I know about food and flavors, I'm slow with a knife and imprecise with a spatula - slicing vegetables unevenly, curling eggs over themselves, making a mess of just-baked cookies. I can't even picture applying a wax seal to a toilet, let alone trimming a counter or digging up a line, or painting a whole apartment well enough to please a stranger. And I wouldn't want to be sent to go help evict a tenant or check for a corpse - or, like the cleaning staff, scrub out some putrid old refrigerator.
It all makes me the more impressed with my dad, who in addition to having a PhD in administration, in addition to his day job as a college vice-president, can still do just about any home-maintenance task short of plumbing. I think he learned a lot of it while growing up - he painted houses or something in high school as a summer job, and I think his dad (who died before I was born) did hands-on work of some kind. When I was a kid, when my dad didn't want to do his graduate work, he worked on our house - finished the basement, built a deck. He hasn't taught any of it to his children, though; Sean and I, drawn to computers, to video games, to sports (him) and books (me), weren't really interested - and may not have been let to even if we were, or at least that's how it felt at the time, though it may not have been entirely true.
I did occasionally pull my dad's home-maintenance book off the shelf and flip through it, especially the part in the back, where they talked about what would go into different levels of toolkits (basic, intermediate, advanced). For me, of course, it was mainly for the pleasure of the illustrations and of new vocabulary words. I surprised my dad once when I was in junior high or so: he, doing some household task, absently asked me to bring him a screwdriver, and I asked back whether it should be flathead or Phillips-head. Now sometimes I think about that book when I'm at work. Looking around my very interesting new world, filled with very interesting people, I wish I'd taken more of it in back then.
To the extent that you haven't figured it out already, either from context or from talking to me in real life, for about three weeks now I've been serving as the interim maintenance liaison for a company that manages properties, mostly rental properties. That is, we're usually not the landlords per se; usually we're the people that local landlords hire on a long-term basis to help them run their apartment, rental house, mobile home park, or what have you. I think that entails a variety of things - certainly we oversee stuff like lease signings, evictions, and I think some record-keeping as well. And, of course, building maintenance goes through us, which is where the maintenance staff and I come in. Their tenants call us, rather than the owner, when their toilets are broken or their ceiling leaks or they lose heat or power.
I'm about to employ a bunch of pseudonyms here, so don't take any of these names as corresponding to their given ones.
We have four main maintenance guys on the payroll - or at least four with whom I work, since apparently there are two others whose jobs are more specialized (construction, for instance) and whom I won't see at this time of year. Two of them, Ben and Jake, do most of the repairs. Ben is the cornerstone of our maintenance department: smart, skilled, hardworking. Jake, though older than Ben, is something of an apprentice - there're only some things he can do yet. I don't know much about either of them outside of their work selves, but Ben is married to Tamara, who works for our (well, "our" is kind of a strong word, as you'll see) professional-cleaning staff; more on them in a minute.
Cal, the third main maintenance guy, doesn't really make repairs (well, come to think of it, he does change locks); instead, he does the janitorial-type jobs - if you need something dirty done, from hauling out garbage to seeing whether there's a dead body in one of the apartments (for real, he had to go check for one this week - thankfully, the tenant whom we'd been afraid might be dead was still alive), he's your guy. He also does the messenger and errand-oriented jobs - lets appliance-delivery staff into vacant apartments, takes written notices out to tenants, shows up to represent us for evictions, and all kinds of things like that. It's easier to know about him as a person because he's in the office more, and is more talkative. I know that he's in his early forties and that he likes, probably among other genres, music from the 80s.
Vince is our main painter, busy at this time of year on what're called "make-ready" jobs, where we prep a property for anyone who's moving in. He's happy-go-lucky, low-pitched and a little drawly of speech - a little like how old, friendly dogs talk in animated movies. He seems to work hard and enjoy himself fairly well, and he likes to joke around and doesn't seem to get angry easily.
Besides them, we have two contractors we work with a lot. Bart gets called a couple of times, basically every day, to go do something that our guys don't do (like remodeling jobs) or don't have time to. He stands out from the main staff both because he's a little younger (the others are in their forties and up) and because he's clean-shaven (even to his shaved head), whereas all the main maintenance guys sport facial hair. Besides him, there's Ash; I've met him briefly, but so far all I know is that he, too, is younger, and that he's got a voice that to me says "surfer dude."
I also ought to mention Clem - I've never met him in person, but he's in charge of maintenance for certain properties that we manage under a sort of subdivision of the main company. I'm told he's a Quaker and that he's in his seventies. Over the phone, he's got a high-pitched old-guy voice (a lot like Mike Hamar's from The Red Green Show) and sounds lively and opinionated.
There's also a whole cleaning staff, mainly female (although there's a guy who cleans carpets and suchlike) - they're not maids, though. They actually work for a small separate company run by my immediate boss, and they're employed mainly for make-readies, so as far as I can tell, they clean vacant properties rather than ones with active residents. The aforementioned Tamara, married to Ben, appears to be the head employee; I've met a couple of her assistants as well.
You may have noticed that I've given all the maintenance guys one-syllable names. This is on purpose. That's exactly how it is in real life: even the guys whose full names are multisyllabic go by single-syllable nicknames. Thus far I have met no exceptions, unless you want to count my bosses, to the extent that they're considered maintenance (though really they're many other things).
My upper boss, the company's owner, speaks a little disparagingly (though not when they're around) of the maintenance guys' intelligence sometimes. I don't agree with him, as I'm about to detail, but it probably stems partly from the job logs they turn in, where they detail their work every day. Cal's handwriting is almost impossible to decipher sometimes, Jake can't spell worth a lick, and even Ben tends to give his whole report in one long fused sentence speckled with apostrophe-essed plurals. And Vince, for all his graceful handwriting, does tend to use quotation marks to mark emphasis:
Paint Complete
"3 Bedrooms"
** Note: Stairs at Lot 16 are broken - "Safety Hazard" **
It's an imperfect office altogether, and we're imperfect, quirky people. Maintenance is no exception: Cal leaves gaps in his timecards where he's been reading a newspaper on the job. Bart, rather than ever starting a job and just working through to its finish, takes on about twenty of them per week and then stretches them all out forever, telling you one day he'll get there tomorrow, and then three days later, with no trace of irony, that he's about to start. Jake probably does willfully misunderstand things once in a while, knowing that it'll lessen his workload a bit if he doesn't ask too many questions. Ben often doesn't make doing inventory any easier for me than he has to: despite my knowing basically nothing about tools and parts, he doesn't go out of his way to specify, or to estimate prices, though sometimes there're four parts in the system under the name he's given, and all of them costing different amounts of money. And to them, I'm probably a bit of a headache myself - not to be trusted yet to ask the right questions of tenants over the phone; unfamiliar with property locations (which makes a difference when I have to decide where to send them next); unable sometimes to hierarchize the relative importance of this job versus that; having always to double-check things with the owner, which takes up everybody's time; maybe even a little too polite to them over the phone.
But I like them, and I admire what they do. I'm quick at typing - quick with my fingers - but poor with my hands, usually not very good at things that are manual, mechanical, dirty, or rough. Even in the kitchen, for all I know about food and flavors, I'm slow with a knife and imprecise with a spatula - slicing vegetables unevenly, curling eggs over themselves, making a mess of just-baked cookies. I can't even picture applying a wax seal to a toilet, let alone trimming a counter or digging up a line, or painting a whole apartment well enough to please a stranger. And I wouldn't want to be sent to go help evict a tenant or check for a corpse - or, like the cleaning staff, scrub out some putrid old refrigerator.
It all makes me the more impressed with my dad, who in addition to having a PhD in administration, in addition to his day job as a college vice-president, can still do just about any home-maintenance task short of plumbing. I think he learned a lot of it while growing up - he painted houses or something in high school as a summer job, and I think his dad (who died before I was born) did hands-on work of some kind. When I was a kid, when my dad didn't want to do his graduate work, he worked on our house - finished the basement, built a deck. He hasn't taught any of it to his children, though; Sean and I, drawn to computers, to video games, to sports (him) and books (me), weren't really interested - and may not have been let to even if we were, or at least that's how it felt at the time, though it may not have been entirely true.
I did occasionally pull my dad's home-maintenance book off the shelf and flip through it, especially the part in the back, where they talked about what would go into different levels of toolkits (basic, intermediate, advanced). For me, of course, it was mainly for the pleasure of the illustrations and of new vocabulary words. I surprised my dad once when I was in junior high or so: he, doing some household task, absently asked me to bring him a screwdriver, and I asked back whether it should be flathead or Phillips-head. Now sometimes I think about that book when I'm at work. Looking around my very interesting new world, filled with very interesting people, I wish I'd taken more of it in back then.
4.12.2012
Three Things
1) I'm deeply enjoying Tim Keller's book King's Cross, which I got for cheap at the 2011 Penguin sale. Looking forward to reading it again sometime, and I haven't even finished it the first time.
2) I think I'll make Greek-inspired chicken in the slow cooker tomorrow. That ought to be a decent way to use two pounds of bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, which I bought in desperation once to use in a recipe when both Wegmans and Weis were out of boneless/skinless, only to find (and buy) boneless/skinless in Weis by the time I actually set out to make said recipe.
3) I think I'm also about to go buy the new dress shoes.
2) I think I'll make Greek-inspired chicken in the slow cooker tomorrow. That ought to be a decent way to use two pounds of bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, which I bought in desperation once to use in a recipe when both Wegmans and Weis were out of boneless/skinless, only to find (and buy) boneless/skinless in Weis by the time I actually set out to make said recipe.
3) I think I'm also about to go buy the new dress shoes.
4.11.2012
File When Ready
Did my taxes tonight. Getting some money back.
Also, oddly, it turns out that I have no record of ever having paid Carrie any rent for October 2011. It's not attached to my August or September checks or anything, and I doubt I would have forked over that much in cash. She's out of the house right now, but I'll have to ask her about that when she gets back.
Also, oddly, it turns out that I have no record of ever having paid Carrie any rent for October 2011. It's not attached to my August or September checks or anything, and I doubt I would have forked over that much in cash. She's out of the house right now, but I'll have to ask her about that when she gets back.
4.10.2012
Li'l Bits
I had a nice Easter.
Work is still okay, although technically I accidentally almost put someone at risk today of potentially being shot dead. Technically. It very, very probably would have been fine, in this case. But now I know better and will be more careful.
And I still have to do my taxes this week. Hooray for e-filing.
Also, I should probably replace both my pairs of dress shoes some night this week. The brown pair is not technically messed up yet (unlike the black ones, which I like a lot and wear often), but any pair that hurts so badly (even with gel heel-savers, which have at least kept said brown shoes from drawing any more blood) that you dread wearing them (and which, after having for almost four years, you've probably managed to wear fewer than a dozen times) should just be called a loss and jettisoned, I say. Especially if you still have Christmas clothing-money to spend.
Work is still okay, although technically I accidentally almost put someone at risk today of potentially being shot dead. Technically. It very, very probably would have been fine, in this case. But now I know better and will be more careful.
And I still have to do my taxes this week. Hooray for e-filing.
Also, I should probably replace both my pairs of dress shoes some night this week. The brown pair is not technically messed up yet (unlike the black ones, which I like a lot and wear often), but any pair that hurts so badly (even with gel heel-savers, which have at least kept said brown shoes from drawing any more blood) that you dread wearing them (and which, after having for almost four years, you've probably managed to wear fewer than a dozen times) should just be called a loss and jettisoned, I say. Especially if you still have Christmas clothing-money to spend.
4.03.2012
Within Five Minutes
Work today went more smoothly - for me, at least. Not so much for my immediate boss, but I'm not exactly sure what was going on there.
We're down to, I dunno, half the maintenance calls? And few of them are really urgent.
Also, one of the maintenance men told everybody who would listen that he'd won the basketball pool. Apparently his was an upset victory, since supposedly it's one of our rental-and-sales guys who's supposed to own the March Madness brackets. Meanwhile, I paid almost no attention once Syracuse lost out in the Elite Eight, but I think Abby's team won it all, so...woo!
And I made Mexican pepper casserole again tonight for supper. This time I remembered the flour.
Thus ends this entry, which is really kind of boring. Have a good night!
We're down to, I dunno, half the maintenance calls? And few of them are really urgent.
Also, one of the maintenance men told everybody who would listen that he'd won the basketball pool. Apparently his was an upset victory, since supposedly it's one of our rental-and-sales guys who's supposed to own the March Madness brackets. Meanwhile, I paid almost no attention once Syracuse lost out in the Elite Eight, but I think Abby's team won it all, so...woo!
And I made Mexican pepper casserole again tonight for supper. This time I remembered the flour.
Thus ends this entry, which is really kind of boring. Have a good night!
4.02.2012
The Shoemaker's Son, Et Cetera
Today was the first workday of the month, which I'm told is always a bad one. By the middle of this afternoon, we had something like twenty-two maintenance calls that were either carryovers from previous days or called in during the day. Last week I think our usual number of those was, say, six to eight. Maybe ten. But not, in my experience, twenty-two.
So I did record-keeping and maintenance calls and suchlike all day, trying to hierarchize things and to keep on top of whom I need to call and what I need to say when I do...and then I got home to a floor strewn with dirty clothes, and flotsam and jetsam on at least half of the room's flat surfaces. I've still got to go to the store tonight, write my rent check, pay a bill, and do at least a bare minimum of laundry. My taxes are not even started, much less finished. I've got to find some tape before I change my calendar over to April, because I accidentally tore the hangup-hole for the month. Oh, and I should also duct-tape my steering-wheel cover, because part of it split open, I guess sometime this past weekend, and a solid but squishy gel-type substance keeps oozing out as I drive.
And that's why Carrie and I ate leftovers tonight. We have interesting jobs, but today they took a lot of our time.
So I did record-keeping and maintenance calls and suchlike all day, trying to hierarchize things and to keep on top of whom I need to call and what I need to say when I do...and then I got home to a floor strewn with dirty clothes, and flotsam and jetsam on at least half of the room's flat surfaces. I've still got to go to the store tonight, write my rent check, pay a bill, and do at least a bare minimum of laundry. My taxes are not even started, much less finished. I've got to find some tape before I change my calendar over to April, because I accidentally tore the hangup-hole for the month. Oh, and I should also duct-tape my steering-wheel cover, because part of it split open, I guess sometime this past weekend, and a solid but squishy gel-type substance keeps oozing out as I drive.
And that's why Carrie and I ate leftovers tonight. We have interesting jobs, but today they took a lot of our time.
3.30.2012
It's Seriously Been About 36 Hours Since I Showered Last
I'm tired. Today at work was a little rough. Carrie's having people over for games, but I'm gonna go grab some dinner. I spent too much at Rite Aid this evening out of sheer gratitude at their pharmacy people being so helpful when I had to send a fax to the health-insurance company today or else my health insurance might get canceled and it'd be all my fault augghhhh (that's not what I said to the pharmacy people, but it was still one of the more stressful to-dos on my list), but I may go out and grab dinner anyway. Board games are the kind of thing I have to be in the mood for. Tonight, I'd much rather read and/or sleep.
3.28.2012
Sometimes I'm Not Smart Enough to Be Afraid When I Should Be
Day two at work: basically everybody, including both my bosses, independently made a joke out of the fact that I'd been brave enough to come for a second day.
Today was harder, and I did at one point get told by a tenant (over the phone) that I should be more on top of things if this was my job. (This was after I'd tried to explain my lack of knowledge about something by saying I was just filling in, so clearly my covert request for mercy got me nowhere.) But it was okay.
I forgot the book I'd meant to read over lunch and ended up spending most of my time (unsuccessfully) on a single level of Angry Birds - the same level that also took up (without success on it) most of yesterday's lunch hour. Maybe I need a twelve-step program. But I'm so close to beating it (and it's the last level in the episode) that I can hardly resist.
Today was harder, and I did at one point get told by a tenant (over the phone) that I should be more on top of things if this was my job. (This was after I'd tried to explain my lack of knowledge about something by saying I was just filling in, so clearly my covert request for mercy got me nowhere.) But it was okay.
I forgot the book I'd meant to read over lunch and ended up spending most of my time (unsuccessfully) on a single level of Angry Birds - the same level that also took up (without success on it) most of yesterday's lunch hour. Maybe I need a twelve-step program. But I'm so close to beating it (and it's the last level in the episode) that I can hardly resist.
3.27.2012
*whew*
Worked a temp job all day today; it appears that it'll extend at least into the near future.
It will probably turn out to be the busiest job I've ever worked. I pretty much have two bosses (not of equal standing in the company - one's the owner, and the other's just my more immediate supervisor, though not by much), and though they're both reasonably nice to me, they're kind of the good cop and bad cop of the company when it comes to how they deal with most people and things. Everyone's really busy, and so am I. It's going to be another round of being tired when I come home, though likely not as badly as with document prep.
Pray that I will quickly acquire sweet organizational skills, especially around 4 PM, when suddenly I have about six or seven things to remember at, like, any given moment.
It's not a bad gig, on the whole: the pay, though not enough for total financial independence, is reasonable for a temp job; I get some occasional downtime moments even in the midst of everything going on; and I even get an hour for lunch. But the best part is that, if it goes long enough, it might at least put me sort of in the running for more types of office jobs, because I should be acquiring more advanced skills.
It's an office that could use more charity all around (towards each other, towards the clients, coming to us from the clients), and probably a little friendship, though there may be some of the latter already. It'll be interesting to see what comes of my time there, and what I can contribute. Right now, I'm aiming for accuracy and courtesy. We'll work from there.
It will probably turn out to be the busiest job I've ever worked. I pretty much have two bosses (not of equal standing in the company - one's the owner, and the other's just my more immediate supervisor, though not by much), and though they're both reasonably nice to me, they're kind of the good cop and bad cop of the company when it comes to how they deal with most people and things. Everyone's really busy, and so am I. It's going to be another round of being tired when I come home, though likely not as badly as with document prep.
Pray that I will quickly acquire sweet organizational skills, especially around 4 PM, when suddenly I have about six or seven things to remember at, like, any given moment.
It's not a bad gig, on the whole: the pay, though not enough for total financial independence, is reasonable for a temp job; I get some occasional downtime moments even in the midst of everything going on; and I even get an hour for lunch. But the best part is that, if it goes long enough, it might at least put me sort of in the running for more types of office jobs, because I should be acquiring more advanced skills.
It's an office that could use more charity all around (towards each other, towards the clients, coming to us from the clients), and probably a little friendship, though there may be some of the latter already. It'll be interesting to see what comes of my time there, and what I can contribute. Right now, I'm aiming for accuracy and courtesy. We'll work from there.
3.24.2012
Seven Quick Takes: Tardy Edition
One: Call me an old lady and a believer in placebos if you want (whether you will depends on how you feel about menthol-based topical analgesics), but I now own a tube of IcyHot, and buying it was seriously among the best ideas I've had all week. The pull of the muscles really was surprisingly prolongedly painful (I actually showered at 12:30 in the morning as Friday began, because I just didn't even know what else to do to take a bite out of the agony I was feeling at that hour), but it really is harder to feel the ache when you've covered the pulled area (which is bigger than my initial posting made it sound like) in what smells and feels basically like Wint-O-Green LifeSavers ground to a paste. (Just don't rub your eyes. I've managed not to quite do that yet, but for all I know, it's only a matter of time.) So there's my nonpaid plug for all that menthol-salicylate kind of stuff. (And for Wint-O-Green LifeSavers, which were basically the unofficial sponsor of many a late-bus ride when I was in school.)
Two: Welcome to Not-Really-Winter 2012: twice over the past few days, I've heard a bird call and wondered whether it was for real or was just some-or-other electronic device going off. Definitely real birds, turns out. (In my defense, though, each call - I think, though I can't remember now, that each was from a different species - sounded unusual in some way. It seems unlikely that we're getting new types of birds around, so maybe it's just that usually more types are around at once, so hearing just one at a time is weird.)
Three: So what I'm saying is, the weather this month has been beautiful. As an added bonus, the Ides of March has passed, and so alternate-side street parking is over (well, in Binghamton, anyway - poor Johnson City always has to wait until April). Not that I have to do as much street parking at Carrie's as I did when I lived in the six-person house, but it's still nice not to have to bother about it.
Four: Maybe this is boring now, but it was kind of funny just after it happened: at Weis yesterday, I had to get an employee to fix the plastic-bottle return because it was showing an error (with accompanying high-pitched distress-call beeps) and not letting me use it. As the employee tended to the machine, a lady starting using another return (cans, or glass, or something) next to it. The employee finished and left. Presumably just after, as I tore myself away from admiring the envelopes of vegetable and flower seeds I'd been looking at during the repair, the lady finished and left. As I returned bottles, I saw that the other return, the one the lady had been using, had had the same error and was now beeping. I didn't have the heart to go bring back the employee, who'd just gotten back to her post.
Five: People! You should make your own pudding. I did it last night, armed with nothing but a few ingredients, a pot and a stove, and Carrie's Mennonite cookbook. It took maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and it was so tasty. You mix sugar, milk (all we had in the house was skim, and I didn't want to use all of it, so I also subbed in 1/4 cup of nonfat half-and-half that we had), cornstarch, and cocoa powder (Fair Trade, in our house, so it's nice that you don't need a ton of it) together in a small saucepan over pretty low heat, stirring all the time. Before too terribly long, it thickens (especially if you eventually cheat and turn up the heat and stop stirring for a minute, like I did), at which point you throw in a little vanilla or almond extract or suchlike - I went for almond, and I didn't regret it - and heat and stir it for maybe another thirty seconds. Then you let it cool, which doesn't take long, and Bob's your uncle! Enjoy.
Six: When freshmen in Openhym, more than once Jodi and I found ourselves watching Strong Bad's E-mail very late at night, "giggling helplessly," as I believe Jo describes it, as we sat at our conjoined desks. Apparently the grownup version of this is to be sitting in a dining room at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning, laughing at an OK Go video you've never seen before. Or at least that's what Carrie and I did today:
Seven: I'm up to the respiratory system in the medical-terminology course, but that's still not as far as I'd like to be. So I think I'll go work through that unit. Cheerio!
Two: Welcome to Not-Really-Winter 2012: twice over the past few days, I've heard a bird call and wondered whether it was for real or was just some-or-other electronic device going off. Definitely real birds, turns out. (In my defense, though, each call - I think, though I can't remember now, that each was from a different species - sounded unusual in some way. It seems unlikely that we're getting new types of birds around, so maybe it's just that usually more types are around at once, so hearing just one at a time is weird.)
Three: So what I'm saying is, the weather this month has been beautiful. As an added bonus, the Ides of March has passed, and so alternate-side street parking is over (well, in Binghamton, anyway - poor Johnson City always has to wait until April). Not that I have to do as much street parking at Carrie's as I did when I lived in the six-person house, but it's still nice not to have to bother about it.
Four: Maybe this is boring now, but it was kind of funny just after it happened: at Weis yesterday, I had to get an employee to fix the plastic-bottle return because it was showing an error (with accompanying high-pitched distress-call beeps) and not letting me use it. As the employee tended to the machine, a lady starting using another return (cans, or glass, or something) next to it. The employee finished and left. Presumably just after, as I tore myself away from admiring the envelopes of vegetable and flower seeds I'd been looking at during the repair, the lady finished and left. As I returned bottles, I saw that the other return, the one the lady had been using, had had the same error and was now beeping. I didn't have the heart to go bring back the employee, who'd just gotten back to her post.
Five: People! You should make your own pudding. I did it last night, armed with nothing but a few ingredients, a pot and a stove, and Carrie's Mennonite cookbook. It took maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and it was so tasty. You mix sugar, milk (all we had in the house was skim, and I didn't want to use all of it, so I also subbed in 1/4 cup of nonfat half-and-half that we had), cornstarch, and cocoa powder (Fair Trade, in our house, so it's nice that you don't need a ton of it) together in a small saucepan over pretty low heat, stirring all the time. Before too terribly long, it thickens (especially if you eventually cheat and turn up the heat and stop stirring for a minute, like I did), at which point you throw in a little vanilla or almond extract or suchlike - I went for almond, and I didn't regret it - and heat and stir it for maybe another thirty seconds. Then you let it cool, which doesn't take long, and Bob's your uncle! Enjoy.
Six: When freshmen in Openhym, more than once Jodi and I found ourselves watching Strong Bad's E-mail very late at night, "giggling helplessly," as I believe Jo describes it, as we sat at our conjoined desks. Apparently the grownup version of this is to be sitting in a dining room at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning, laughing at an OK Go video you've never seen before. Or at least that's what Carrie and I did today:
Seven: I'm up to the respiratory system in the medical-terminology course, but that's still not as far as I'd like to be. So I think I'll go work through that unit. Cheerio!
3.22.2012
"myo = muscle"; "alg = pain" -> "myalgia = muscle pain"
As the above may suggest (but probably doesn't, unless I've already told you what I'm up to), I'm teaching myself basic medical terminology via, among other things, this course. This is so that I have a better shot at administrative-assistant jobs at hospitals, given that I need a career change, because attempting to support myself in New England via adjunct teaching would be a terrible and poverty-inducing idea.
Medical terminology, in fact, is kind of fun, especially if you're something of a linguo-geek (though compared to my boyfriend - who majored in French; audited German classes for fun; knows or knew a smattering of Quenya, Sindarin, and Esperanto; and ran circles around me in our college Basic Linguistics class - I don't merit that term). I know a lot of the roots and prefixes and suffixes already, and I've always liked learning about human anatomy and physiology.
I am currently experiencing some temporary myalgia, hence the post title. Every x-number of months, I end up pulling a neck and/or shoulder muscle or three while I sleep or as I wake up, and this morning, shortly before six AM, was just such a time. A particularly bad one, too - one of those multiple pulls where ibuprofen really only does so much, and you go around all day trying to find a bodily position that doesn't hurt (hint: this is not quite possible), which, if you're not working that day, as thankfully I wasn't, means that you're strongly tempted to loll around in bed. I did that several times.
I'll tell you, I think it's been a while since I was up at six AM. I ended up going downstairs, turning on Morning Edition, and making myself some of Carrie's homemade fruit-and-nut oatmeal mix. (She wasn't in the house, so I couldn't ask permission, but I'm sure she'd have given it.) And then, a little past seven, I went back to sleep for a while, pulling muscles again upon one of those stressful half-waking moments when you're trying and trying to focus your eyes, but you can't because you're still locked partway into REM, until suddenly your whole head jerks hard and you're fully awake and know what was dream and what was reality.
So it's been an unusual day. On the other hand, I can now tell you about various maladies of the digestive system, not all of which I knew of when I got up. And I've wallowed in the literary pleasures of C.S. Lewis, Tim Keller, and David G. Myers (yes, the latter does mean I broke out my sophomore-year social-psych textbook to reread something). The writers, whom on a more normal day I may not have gotten to, seem worth a little neck and shoulder pain.
Medical terminology, in fact, is kind of fun, especially if you're something of a linguo-geek (though compared to my boyfriend - who majored in French; audited German classes for fun; knows or knew a smattering of Quenya, Sindarin, and Esperanto; and ran circles around me in our college Basic Linguistics class - I don't merit that term). I know a lot of the roots and prefixes and suffixes already, and I've always liked learning about human anatomy and physiology.
I am currently experiencing some temporary myalgia, hence the post title. Every x-number of months, I end up pulling a neck and/or shoulder muscle or three while I sleep or as I wake up, and this morning, shortly before six AM, was just such a time. A particularly bad one, too - one of those multiple pulls where ibuprofen really only does so much, and you go around all day trying to find a bodily position that doesn't hurt (hint: this is not quite possible), which, if you're not working that day, as thankfully I wasn't, means that you're strongly tempted to loll around in bed. I did that several times.
I'll tell you, I think it's been a while since I was up at six AM. I ended up going downstairs, turning on Morning Edition, and making myself some of Carrie's homemade fruit-and-nut oatmeal mix. (She wasn't in the house, so I couldn't ask permission, but I'm sure she'd have given it.) And then, a little past seven, I went back to sleep for a while, pulling muscles again upon one of those stressful half-waking moments when you're trying and trying to focus your eyes, but you can't because you're still locked partway into REM, until suddenly your whole head jerks hard and you're fully awake and know what was dream and what was reality.
So it's been an unusual day. On the other hand, I can now tell you about various maladies of the digestive system, not all of which I knew of when I got up. And I've wallowed in the literary pleasures of C.S. Lewis, Tim Keller, and David G. Myers (yes, the latter does mean I broke out my sophomore-year social-psych textbook to reread something). The writers, whom on a more normal day I may not have gotten to, seem worth a little neck and shoulder pain.
3.20.2012
Which I Will Never Be Able to Phrase Well Enough
None of these thoughts are original; they're really just rephrased from other, more articulate people.
So the problem with the idea of "you can believe whatever you want, but don't try to impose it on others" is, of course, that that statement itself is a belief. It's a belief about how the world should work. And no one who says it is like, "But if you don't want to separate your beliefs from your actions, fine, whatever, because I'm not going to impose that view on you." No, they want belief-imposers to stop holding their own view (that people should sometimes operate according to other people's beliefs instead of their own) and adopt theirs (that people's beliefs shouldn't have a bearing on what other people are made to do).
Also, of course, it's not like we take abusive spouses' beliefs about the proper attitude towards marital partners into account when we create legislation against domestic violence, so people don't actually mean that beliefs and actions should always be held separately. (Well, actually, despite not having asked any spousal abusers myself, I wonder whether many people guilty of it are against abuse in theory, but just have some-or-other way to justify, to themselves, their committing it. But I doubt all of them are.) What people mean is that there's something special about religious beliefs that makes them different from other kinds of beliefs. For most people, this boils down to, "Faith is something that can't be proven true or false, and so any decision made as a direct result of faith should be judged by whether we think it's helpful or unhelpful to people's self-fulfillment, rather than whether it's based on truth or falsehood."
And the question of what "proof" is is a whole other argument, so I'm not going to bother with it here. But my point is, people think of faith as something which only some people have. But that's not true: everyone believes something about the universe, and it directly affects which laws they think should and shouldn't be passed. If you believe that there's no God or that He doesn't judge people, then you're probably going to grant a ton of importance to what people want to do with their lives, because they've theoretically only got one life, so the primary object (whether we'd formally phrase it this way or not) is going to be for them to do what makes them happy, at least until it makes someone else unhappy or unsafe in some significant way (defining "significant" is where it gets complicated). And that's going to mean that your idea of what should be done in a situation is sometimes going to be very different from someone else's idea.
I'm in favor of compromise in most cases. But I think we're foolish if we assume that people of faith are the only people with "unprovable" opinions about the way the world works. Everybody has those. If non-religious people get asked about their worldview, they can't, either, prove it in the way that they do mathematics; they can only present their evidence and take their stand. That's what people of faith do as well. And I taught rhetoric, and I know that some kinds of proof are better than others. But secular people should not be so sure that their evidence for their opinions is so much better than religious people's. In my experience, it typically is not. And I'm not just talking about self-unaware secular people who haven't thought about it; I'm talking about people who have a formal argument to make.
Morals determined by democracy are unsatisfying because, at heart, they're really just a handcount. You present your evidence; you hope the handcount goes your way. But if we're determining issues in this city, state, country, and world, then let's not imply that some people should be sent out of the room during the handcount just for doing the same thing that everybody does, but being more up front about the fact that they're doing it.
But hey, I only have three regular readers left, and they all agree with me already as it is. So I'm not going to edit this to death right now; I'm going to do any one of the half-dozen things that I really ought to do instead.
So the problem with the idea of "you can believe whatever you want, but don't try to impose it on others" is, of course, that that statement itself is a belief. It's a belief about how the world should work. And no one who says it is like, "But if you don't want to separate your beliefs from your actions, fine, whatever, because I'm not going to impose that view on you." No, they want belief-imposers to stop holding their own view (that people should sometimes operate according to other people's beliefs instead of their own) and adopt theirs (that people's beliefs shouldn't have a bearing on what other people are made to do).
Also, of course, it's not like we take abusive spouses' beliefs about the proper attitude towards marital partners into account when we create legislation against domestic violence, so people don't actually mean that beliefs and actions should always be held separately. (Well, actually, despite not having asked any spousal abusers myself, I wonder whether many people guilty of it are against abuse in theory, but just have some-or-other way to justify, to themselves, their committing it. But I doubt all of them are.) What people mean is that there's something special about religious beliefs that makes them different from other kinds of beliefs. For most people, this boils down to, "Faith is something that can't be proven true or false, and so any decision made as a direct result of faith should be judged by whether we think it's helpful or unhelpful to people's self-fulfillment, rather than whether it's based on truth or falsehood."
And the question of what "proof" is is a whole other argument, so I'm not going to bother with it here. But my point is, people think of faith as something which only some people have. But that's not true: everyone believes something about the universe, and it directly affects which laws they think should and shouldn't be passed. If you believe that there's no God or that He doesn't judge people, then you're probably going to grant a ton of importance to what people want to do with their lives, because they've theoretically only got one life, so the primary object (whether we'd formally phrase it this way or not) is going to be for them to do what makes them happy, at least until it makes someone else unhappy or unsafe in some significant way (defining "significant" is where it gets complicated). And that's going to mean that your idea of what should be done in a situation is sometimes going to be very different from someone else's idea.
I'm in favor of compromise in most cases. But I think we're foolish if we assume that people of faith are the only people with "unprovable" opinions about the way the world works. Everybody has those. If non-religious people get asked about their worldview, they can't, either, prove it in the way that they do mathematics; they can only present their evidence and take their stand. That's what people of faith do as well. And I taught rhetoric, and I know that some kinds of proof are better than others. But secular people should not be so sure that their evidence for their opinions is so much better than religious people's. In my experience, it typically is not. And I'm not just talking about self-unaware secular people who haven't thought about it; I'm talking about people who have a formal argument to make.
Morals determined by democracy are unsatisfying because, at heart, they're really just a handcount. You present your evidence; you hope the handcount goes your way. But if we're determining issues in this city, state, country, and world, then let's not imply that some people should be sent out of the room during the handcount just for doing the same thing that everybody does, but being more up front about the fact that they're doing it.
But hey, I only have three regular readers left, and they all agree with me already as it is. So I'm not going to edit this to death right now; I'm going to do any one of the half-dozen things that I really ought to do instead.
3.19.2012
I Was in Syracuse, Hence the Not-Blogging
I saw the St. Patrick's Day parade, in which my dad was one of the many marchers. It was okay, but not as good as Binghamton's, since Binghamton's had more NYC bands and generally more stuff going on. Plus, our parade route's narrower, so it's a closer-knit feel.
3.15.2012
Hedging
I have tried to be precise and honest on these cover letters, but there has been one point where I've hedged somewhat: many job descriptions emphasize the importance of strong organizational skills. I've taken to saying things like, "Designing my course curriculum according to departmental standards and keeping gradebooks for each of my course sections taught me the importance of organizational skills."
I am hoping that "taught me the importance of" is not tantamount to saying "gave me." They didn't; they gave me deep regret that I was not more organized, and taught me organization's importance through what a bother and source of guilt it was when I failed (and failed, and failed) to stay on track. Because, I mean, the whole and painfully precise truth is, "I tend to be noticeably more organized with stuff that belongs to other people than I am about stuff that's mine, especially if I'm only minimally accountable to anyone besides myself. Please believe me."
But somehow I don't think that that's going to fly.
I am hoping that "taught me the importance of" is not tantamount to saying "gave me." They didn't; they gave me deep regret that I was not more organized, and taught me organization's importance through what a bother and source of guilt it was when I failed (and failed, and failed) to stay on track. Because, I mean, the whole and painfully precise truth is, "I tend to be noticeably more organized with stuff that belongs to other people than I am about stuff that's mine, especially if I'm only minimally accountable to anyone besides myself. Please believe me."
But somehow I don't think that that's going to fly.
3.13.2012
Resistance is Futile, and Most Job Applications Probably Are, Too
1) Where can I get a typing certification, as required for application to work as a typist for the Rhode Island state government? Ignore with me, for the moment, the probable unlikelihood of my getting such a job even if I succeed in getting the typing certification (especially since it's not like it's much more unlikely that I'll get that than that I'll get any other ruddy job). I'm really wondering, because they said to send a copy of a typing test, but I can't figure out where I would take one. Broome County doesn't do them unless you're applying to one of their jobs; the Yellow Pages results for "typing certification" are inaccurate. What next? I could check Syracuse, I suppose, but I was kind of hoping it wouldn't come to that. So far searches for places in Cortland and Owego have proven fruitless, too.
2) Not that Mother Jones is the world's most detached and balanced resource when it comes to reports about labor issues, but today at the dentist's office (woo, no cavities!) I read this article (warning: contains the occasional discussion, in passing, of items best kept private; also contains R-rated-movie-style profanity) about what it's like to work in a major packing warehouse for an online shipping company around the holiday season, and it kind of threw me. Maybe I almost wouldn't believe her tales about how bad it was, except that she's worked other places that have been, though bad, not that bad, which lends her some credibility in my eyes because the place I just temped last month is actually not that far from a factory system in the way it approaches office work (and it too puts security measures in place to limit what you can have out in public workspace, and who can come in and go out), so a lot of it actually felt a little familiar, though her experience was ramped up to a degree way beyond mine. But what she says about ever-increasing targets, standards based on maximum possible production, needing ibuprofen, and the phenomenon of working hard all day but having little pay to show for it are true even to the introductory degree to which I experienced them, and I could see how it really could, on a major-retailer scale, get that bad.
In her place, by the way, I know I would have been fired for crying.
3) Despite how the previous two numbers make it sound, this has been a nice week so far, and is shaping up to finish well, too. Happy Pi-Day-and-Birthday-of-Alberts (at least two that I can think of) tomorrow; may you (except where allergies/intolerances forbid) eat something with a crust and tasty filling or toppings. I will be: without even thinking about the Pi Day thing, I set plans in motion for homemade pizza tomorrow night.
2) Not that Mother Jones is the world's most detached and balanced resource when it comes to reports about labor issues, but today at the dentist's office (woo, no cavities!) I read this article (warning: contains the occasional discussion, in passing, of items best kept private; also contains R-rated-movie-style profanity) about what it's like to work in a major packing warehouse for an online shipping company around the holiday season, and it kind of threw me. Maybe I almost wouldn't believe her tales about how bad it was, except that she's worked other places that have been, though bad, not that bad, which lends her some credibility in my eyes because the place I just temped last month is actually not that far from a factory system in the way it approaches office work (and it too puts security measures in place to limit what you can have out in public workspace, and who can come in and go out), so a lot of it actually felt a little familiar, though her experience was ramped up to a degree way beyond mine. But what she says about ever-increasing targets, standards based on maximum possible production, needing ibuprofen, and the phenomenon of working hard all day but having little pay to show for it are true even to the introductory degree to which I experienced them, and I could see how it really could, on a major-retailer scale, get that bad.
In her place, by the way, I know I would have been fired for crying.
3) Despite how the previous two numbers make it sound, this has been a nice week so far, and is shaping up to finish well, too. Happy Pi-Day-and-Birthday-of-Alberts (at least two that I can think of) tomorrow; may you (except where allergies/intolerances forbid) eat something with a crust and tasty filling or toppings. I will be: without even thinking about the Pi Day thing, I set plans in motion for homemade pizza tomorrow night.
3.10.2012
With the Stove Temporarily Off, Since My Computer's Upstairs
For part of this afternoon, I worked the temp job that had necessitated the khakis. It went well, and I even got lunch thrown in.
Now I'm making the chicken stock that I never did make last night; I'm also about to do my house chores. And I'm theoretically going to not forget to put my clock forward. Good night!
Now I'm making the chicken stock that I never did make last night; I'm also about to do my house chores. And I'm theoretically going to not forget to put my clock forward. Good night!
3.09.2012
Short, Because I Haven't Eaten Dinner Yet
I did succeed in finding consignment-shop khakis last night, although they were more expensive than I expected, and don't fit as well as they might. I do have a button-down shirt in a fairly-well-matching color, though, which is a plus. (One minus: it's short-sleeved. Oh, well, the event's inside anyway.)
Now (or at least after dinner) I'm going to do some laundry, so as to get the thrift-store scent out of the khakis. I may or may not also make some chicken stock.
Now (or at least after dinner) I'm going to do some laundry, so as to get the thrift-store scent out of the khakis. I may or may not also make some chicken stock.
3.08.2012
In Which I Need to Buy Some Khaki Pants, Even Though I Don't Like Wearing Khaki Pants
And even though thinking about them makes me sing the chorus to Reliant K's "Sadie Hawkins Dance," either in my head or aloud (or both). Or something close to the chorus, except that it turns out I've been getting a couple of the words wrong.
Anyway, yes: having just gotten rid of my khaki pants recently, because I don't look good in khaki, and so I never wear them, I was informed yesterday that I am required to wear them to my upcoming one-day (and even then, only half a day) temp job. I asked whether the pants needed to be khaki, rather than gray or something, and was told that, in fact, they did.
Also, I need to wear a button-down shirt, which of course leads to the following question: do I own a button-down shirt in a color that goes with khaki-colored pants? I would not be at all surprised if I did not.
Carrie suggested, very sensibly, that I start by looking in consignment shops and the Salvo, since I probably won't wear the khakis a lot once I've gotten them. (Plus, though she didn't point this out, it'd be better not to spend half my upcoming paycheck on the clothes I'll need to wear in order to get it.) So that, after dinner, is what I plan to do.
Seriously, you're going to have to pardon this being one of the world's less interesting blogs. Though this probably doesn't account for all of the problem, by day I've been looking for full-time jobs (or procrastinating, but I've really done much less of that this week than you'd expect), and by night I've done church stuff or read, and I've been off the internet past 9 PM (though I'm still not going to bed early, thanks to, well, not really being serious about wanting to). So I haven't written all the long, nuanced, and/or engaging things (or at least I think they are) that occasionally cross my mind.
But if you would like something like that this evening, I refer you to Conversion Diary's Jennifer Fulwiler, who's much better at that genre than I am, and whose post today includes the sentence, "I have an odd personality type that could be described as 'mostly extremely lazy, with occasional flashes of Type A behavior.'" If that's not worth a giggle, then clearly your sense of humor differs from mine.
Anyway, yes: having just gotten rid of my khaki pants recently, because I don't look good in khaki, and so I never wear them, I was informed yesterday that I am required to wear them to my upcoming one-day (and even then, only half a day) temp job. I asked whether the pants needed to be khaki, rather than gray or something, and was told that, in fact, they did.
Also, I need to wear a button-down shirt, which of course leads to the following question: do I own a button-down shirt in a color that goes with khaki-colored pants? I would not be at all surprised if I did not.
Carrie suggested, very sensibly, that I start by looking in consignment shops and the Salvo, since I probably won't wear the khakis a lot once I've gotten them. (Plus, though she didn't point this out, it'd be better not to spend half my upcoming paycheck on the clothes I'll need to wear in order to get it.) So that, after dinner, is what I plan to do.
Seriously, you're going to have to pardon this being one of the world's less interesting blogs. Though this probably doesn't account for all of the problem, by day I've been looking for full-time jobs (or procrastinating, but I've really done much less of that this week than you'd expect), and by night I've done church stuff or read, and I've been off the internet past 9 PM (though I'm still not going to bed early, thanks to, well, not really being serious about wanting to). So I haven't written all the long, nuanced, and/or engaging things (or at least I think they are) that occasionally cross my mind.
But if you would like something like that this evening, I refer you to Conversion Diary's Jennifer Fulwiler, who's much better at that genre than I am, and whose post today includes the sentence, "I have an odd personality type that could be described as 'mostly extremely lazy, with occasional flashes of Type A behavior.'" If that's not worth a giggle, then clearly your sense of humor differs from mine.
3.07.2012
Another Entry that was Supposed to be about Something Else
(Tell me, which of those words should have been capitalized? Argh, it always seemed so straightforward when I taught my students.)
I'm in a hurry, but I have the following observations and questions:
1. I've now been rejected from a job in a mere four hours (thank you, Brown).
2. I (given some sharing with my friends...but not nearly enough to justify this) have gone through two boxes of Girl Scout cookies in only three days. That can't be good.
3. When am I going to get my room and car clean enough to be vacuumed, and am I actually going to succeed in vacuuming once those days arrive?
I'm in a hurry, but I have the following observations and questions:
1. I've now been rejected from a job in a mere four hours (thank you, Brown).
2. I (given some sharing with my friends...but not nearly enough to justify this) have gone through two boxes of Girl Scout cookies in only three days. That can't be good.
3. When am I going to get my room and car clean enough to be vacuumed, and am I actually going to succeed in vacuuming once those days arrive?
3.06.2012
A Sometimes-Not-Very-Tuesday-Feeling Tuesday
It's been a full, rich couple of days - yesterday in particular. One part I can't blog about, because it's got someone else's secrets in it, but suffice it to say that my whole schedule was derailed, but it was altogether worth it.
Tonight we had Ife, Jerry, and the Kennedy boys over - A. is almost eight years old, and R. is five, and they're staying with Ife/Jerry/Tuttle while their parents are at a conference (their sisters are at other people's houses). We fed them a dinner that departed from our usual style - it featured hot dogs, leftover bagged salad, sweet-potato fries out of the Wegmans frozen-food section, and apple slices - but was still pretty tasty. We all talked to and teased R. throughout the meal, and made him laugh; so cute.
Seriously, is it really almost a month since my car was in the shop and I was driving a rental around? It feels like too vivid an experience for that. February went quickly, guys.
Still, I'm looking forward to spring. I just found out: Daylight Savings starts this coming Sunday! Don't forget to change your clocks.
Tonight we had Ife, Jerry, and the Kennedy boys over - A. is almost eight years old, and R. is five, and they're staying with Ife/Jerry/Tuttle while their parents are at a conference (their sisters are at other people's houses). We fed them a dinner that departed from our usual style - it featured hot dogs, leftover bagged salad, sweet-potato fries out of the Wegmans frozen-food section, and apple slices - but was still pretty tasty. We all talked to and teased R. throughout the meal, and made him laugh; so cute.
Seriously, is it really almost a month since my car was in the shop and I was driving a rental around? It feels like too vivid an experience for that. February went quickly, guys.
Still, I'm looking forward to spring. I just found out: Daylight Savings starts this coming Sunday! Don't forget to change your clocks.
3.03.2012
The Previous Entry's Title Proved an Unfortunate Choice in One Sense
Warning: This entry may not be for the squeamish. No bodily fluids in it, but there's still a yuck factor, the level of which will vary based on how you tend to feel about such things as this entry concerns.
So here's what I actually did last night, which admittedly was a little more interesting than the plans I laid out for you:
I ate my orange slices out in the living room while reading Jo's Boys, and the orange was so good that I then got up and got our other big orange and did the same thing over again.
Then I dumped the orange peels in a small saucepan on the stove.
Then, instead of cleaning up the kitchen, I kept reading out in the living room, but ate caramels instead.
Then...I heard a potentially-ominous snap in the kitchen, though quieter than I'd expected. Soon after, to my combined alarm, dismay, and disgust, came a scrabbling noise, and then silence.
I should mention that the reason we had caramels in the house was because we'd used two of them to bait mousetraps. Carrie and I have found that it works better than peanut butter. (I think we partly melt them first.)
We were pretty sure we had another mouse (we get about one a year) because Carrie had found, a couple of days ago, what she thought might be droppings - not the bunch of them that we found last year, but a few, enough to concern her. So she took out a trap and baited it on Wednesday night or so with peanut butter, since at that point we'd had no caramel.
By Thursday night, though the trap was unsprung, the peanut butter was gone. That pretty well settled things, so yesterday, during a quick supplemental shopping trip, I'd bought a bag of caramels. Carrie baited our traps, which are nicer-looking than the classic ones like you see in cartoons. These ones probably qualify as "clam-style," though they're more triangular; the whole thing opens and closes, rather than just having a bar come down. The advantage of our kind is that it conveniently hides (I said this entry might not be for the squeamish) the dead mouse's head from view. (Like, I don't know if the designer meant to do that, but it's certainly one of the benefits.)
So there I was in the house, with Carrie out at InterVarsity. On the one hand, the stuff in the kitchen was all still out - dirty dishes, leftover dinner (though that, thank heavens, was covered over with a pan lid, and it wasn't the kind of lid a mouse was likely to just jog open), those uncovered orange peels. On the other hand, there'd been the scrabbling, and there was a chance that the mouse was still alive in the trap. And, I mean, even its being dead in the trap was still a distasteful prospect.
I was also kind of afraid, because I'd never seen a trapped mouse before (last year Carrie found the trapped one in the morning, while I was still sleeping, and disposed of it before I woke), that the mouse, if it were still alive, would get crazed and start running, and I didn't want to be in the living room if suddenly a trap with feet started careening around.
So I moved into Carrie's office for a bit and listened. No sound of a mouse potentially coming into the living room or anything. Ultimately, I went back into the living room, having gotten my iPod out of my room, and proceeded to play Angry Birds until Carrie came back. I did not go into the kitchen until her return.
Carrie understood that. She hates dead mice, though she's dealt with them before. So, with some feelings of dread, we went into the dining room, which adjoins the kitchen. I turned on the light. There was a chance that I wouldn't be able to see the mouse until I went into the kitchen, because though one of the traps was in plain sight, the other was behind the garbage can (we'd set them near two places we thought the mice could come in). Carrie wanted me to look first into the kitchen, to the visible trap. So, in the light shining into the kitchen from the dining room, I did.
"Yeeaughhh!" I said (or something), drawing back, and I meant it.
Now, I have seen a dead mouse before, because my family used to have an indoor-outdoor cat. In fact, I have pretty much seen my cat start eating a mouse, or at least some small creature, on my front porch. But somehow, don't ask me why, this was worse. I think it was the fact that the mouse was kind of splayed out. (I realized this morning, unfortunately, that the reason the snap of the trap had been quieter than I'd expected was because, unlike the times I've accidentally sprung it with my toe, this time said trap had actually caught and held something.)
After Carrie and I briefly considered the situation, I went upstairs and found my latex gloves, even though I had no intention of actually touching the mouse unless absolutely necessary. I brought Carrie down a pair as well, though she didn't take them. I put mine on and turned on the kitchen light.
I don't remember now how we moved the mousetrap out from by the dishwasher - I may have used a broom handle, or Carrie may have had some other solution. Either way, one of us took the lid off our garbage can, and I gingerly picked up the trap, with mouse attached, and dropped it in ("[The traps are] reusable," Carrie had said, "but [in this case] I'm okay with wasting plastic"), and then threw out the glove just for good measure. Then we washed our hands. Then, because it was a new garbage bag, and we're now going to have a dead mouse in its bottom, I sprinkled some baking soda in there to try to keep it from smelling over time.
I put cinnamon sticks and cloves and water in with the orange peels for potpourri, I turned on the stove to get the water hot and the scent spread around, and Carrie and I, via division of labor and combined efforts, put dinner away, emptied the dishwasher, and cleaned the kitchen.
And that is how I came to belatedly feel a slight sense of rue, when I thought of it this morning, for my choice to quote a cartoon mouse in last night's title.
So here's what I actually did last night, which admittedly was a little more interesting than the plans I laid out for you:
I ate my orange slices out in the living room while reading Jo's Boys, and the orange was so good that I then got up and got our other big orange and did the same thing over again.
Then I dumped the orange peels in a small saucepan on the stove.
Then, instead of cleaning up the kitchen, I kept reading out in the living room, but ate caramels instead.
Then...I heard a potentially-ominous snap in the kitchen, though quieter than I'd expected. Soon after, to my combined alarm, dismay, and disgust, came a scrabbling noise, and then silence.
I should mention that the reason we had caramels in the house was because we'd used two of them to bait mousetraps. Carrie and I have found that it works better than peanut butter. (I think we partly melt them first.)
We were pretty sure we had another mouse (we get about one a year) because Carrie had found, a couple of days ago, what she thought might be droppings - not the bunch of them that we found last year, but a few, enough to concern her. So she took out a trap and baited it on Wednesday night or so with peanut butter, since at that point we'd had no caramel.
By Thursday night, though the trap was unsprung, the peanut butter was gone. That pretty well settled things, so yesterday, during a quick supplemental shopping trip, I'd bought a bag of caramels. Carrie baited our traps, which are nicer-looking than the classic ones like you see in cartoons. These ones probably qualify as "clam-style," though they're more triangular; the whole thing opens and closes, rather than just having a bar come down. The advantage of our kind is that it conveniently hides (I said this entry might not be for the squeamish) the dead mouse's head from view. (Like, I don't know if the designer meant to do that, but it's certainly one of the benefits.)
So there I was in the house, with Carrie out at InterVarsity. On the one hand, the stuff in the kitchen was all still out - dirty dishes, leftover dinner (though that, thank heavens, was covered over with a pan lid, and it wasn't the kind of lid a mouse was likely to just jog open), those uncovered orange peels. On the other hand, there'd been the scrabbling, and there was a chance that the mouse was still alive in the trap. And, I mean, even its being dead in the trap was still a distasteful prospect.
I was also kind of afraid, because I'd never seen a trapped mouse before (last year Carrie found the trapped one in the morning, while I was still sleeping, and disposed of it before I woke), that the mouse, if it were still alive, would get crazed and start running, and I didn't want to be in the living room if suddenly a trap with feet started careening around.
So I moved into Carrie's office for a bit and listened. No sound of a mouse potentially coming into the living room or anything. Ultimately, I went back into the living room, having gotten my iPod out of my room, and proceeded to play Angry Birds until Carrie came back. I did not go into the kitchen until her return.
Carrie understood that. She hates dead mice, though she's dealt with them before. So, with some feelings of dread, we went into the dining room, which adjoins the kitchen. I turned on the light. There was a chance that I wouldn't be able to see the mouse until I went into the kitchen, because though one of the traps was in plain sight, the other was behind the garbage can (we'd set them near two places we thought the mice could come in). Carrie wanted me to look first into the kitchen, to the visible trap. So, in the light shining into the kitchen from the dining room, I did.
"Yeeaughhh!" I said (or something), drawing back, and I meant it.
Now, I have seen a dead mouse before, because my family used to have an indoor-outdoor cat. In fact, I have pretty much seen my cat start eating a mouse, or at least some small creature, on my front porch. But somehow, don't ask me why, this was worse. I think it was the fact that the mouse was kind of splayed out. (I realized this morning, unfortunately, that the reason the snap of the trap had been quieter than I'd expected was because, unlike the times I've accidentally sprung it with my toe, this time said trap had actually caught and held something.)
After Carrie and I briefly considered the situation, I went upstairs and found my latex gloves, even though I had no intention of actually touching the mouse unless absolutely necessary. I brought Carrie down a pair as well, though she didn't take them. I put mine on and turned on the kitchen light.
I don't remember now how we moved the mousetrap out from by the dishwasher - I may have used a broom handle, or Carrie may have had some other solution. Either way, one of us took the lid off our garbage can, and I gingerly picked up the trap, with mouse attached, and dropped it in ("[The traps are] reusable," Carrie had said, "but [in this case] I'm okay with wasting plastic"), and then threw out the glove just for good measure. Then we washed our hands. Then, because it was a new garbage bag, and we're now going to have a dead mouse in its bottom, I sprinkled some baking soda in there to try to keep it from smelling over time.
I put cinnamon sticks and cloves and water in with the orange peels for potpourri, I turned on the stove to get the water hot and the scent spread around, and Carrie and I, via division of labor and combined efforts, put dinner away, emptied the dishwasher, and cleaned the kitchen.
And that is how I came to belatedly feel a slight sense of rue, when I thought of it this morning, for my choice to quote a cartoon mouse in last night's title.
3.02.2012
"Gee, Brain, what're we going to do tonight?"
Perhaps surprisingly, no, I won't be trying to take over the world. Here are my plans instead:
I shall continue digesting our tasty dinner (pasta with sausage and kale).
I'll eat an orange (it's already sliced and ready) and reread a little more of Jo's Boys.
I mean to clean up the kitchen, at least in the sense of getting the dirty dishes washed or in the dishwasher.
Maybe I'll even clean the kitchen in a formal way, since it's one of my house chores for this week.
And I'll probably simmer a few of our ancient cinnamon sticks, plus my orange peel and maybe some cloves, as a little potpourri, basically because we have no intention of putting the cinnamon sticks in anything food-or-drink-oriented, but ought to do something with them (I'll use this site's directions).
If I'm smart, I'll also pay my health-insurance bill, get my Red Cross paperwork together (I have to submit reports as part of one of the programs I'm with), and do some laundry. But I have had a surprisingly busy day already, so we'll see.
I shall continue digesting our tasty dinner (pasta with sausage and kale).
I'll eat an orange (it's already sliced and ready) and reread a little more of Jo's Boys.
I mean to clean up the kitchen, at least in the sense of getting the dirty dishes washed or in the dishwasher.
Maybe I'll even clean the kitchen in a formal way, since it's one of my house chores for this week.
And I'll probably simmer a few of our ancient cinnamon sticks, plus my orange peel and maybe some cloves, as a little potpourri, basically because we have no intention of putting the cinnamon sticks in anything food-or-drink-oriented, but ought to do something with them (I'll use this site's directions).
If I'm smart, I'll also pay my health-insurance bill, get my Red Cross paperwork together (I have to submit reports as part of one of the programs I'm with), and do some laundry. But I have had a surprisingly busy day already, so we'll see.
3.01.2012
Announcement, and Yet More on Food
I meant to write something serious and kind of expository today, but instead I looked for jobs and then cooked a small feast.
About the jobs: I'm planning to move to New England. It's time my boyfriend and I lived in the same state (or at least, as they say, "as near as makes no difference," since parts of Massachusetts are close to where he is in Rhode Island), and since he has a good job and I have not, I'm the one planning to move. It won't be until I have a job on which I can get an apartment and support myself, though, so I'm busy applying for full-time, grownup sorts of positions. This is no easy task when one's education has primarily served only to make her unfit for any other career besides the specialized but rather non-remunerative one she initially chose. (One says that one can do many things with an English major, but the question is, which ones don't require previous experience and/or a degree in a different field?) All the same, it's a fairly big world out there, and I'm not place-bound to one specific county, so I think it'll turn out all right.
Anyway, tonight I had Joe, Andrea, Pisey, and Ife over for dinner (Carrie ate, too), partly because I wanted to make orange chicken, like the stuff we all ate when Joe, Andrea, and Tom came to visit Albert and me late this past July. The recipe probably serves four in its regular form, so rather than scale it down to fit just Carrie and me, I scaled it up to feed six. With the extra time it turned out I had, I also made spiced carrot-orange soup. We ate the chicken over brown rice.
I've run out of time, but we all enjoyed it very much.
About the jobs: I'm planning to move to New England. It's time my boyfriend and I lived in the same state (or at least, as they say, "as near as makes no difference," since parts of Massachusetts are close to where he is in Rhode Island), and since he has a good job and I have not, I'm the one planning to move. It won't be until I have a job on which I can get an apartment and support myself, though, so I'm busy applying for full-time, grownup sorts of positions. This is no easy task when one's education has primarily served only to make her unfit for any other career besides the specialized but rather non-remunerative one she initially chose. (One says that one can do many things with an English major, but the question is, which ones don't require previous experience and/or a degree in a different field?) All the same, it's a fairly big world out there, and I'm not place-bound to one specific county, so I think it'll turn out all right.
Anyway, tonight I had Joe, Andrea, Pisey, and Ife over for dinner (Carrie ate, too), partly because I wanted to make orange chicken, like the stuff we all ate when Joe, Andrea, and Tom came to visit Albert and me late this past July. The recipe probably serves four in its regular form, so rather than scale it down to fit just Carrie and me, I scaled it up to feed six. With the extra time it turned out I had, I also made spiced carrot-orange soup. We ate the chicken over brown rice.
I've run out of time, but we all enjoyed it very much.
2.29.2012
Quickly, Before I Go to Joe and Andrea's
Carrie and I made our own fresh mozzarella today. It was quick and easy, and tasted pretty good. We put it on pizza.
Also, here's to Davy Jones, may he rest in peace: I indirectly owe The Monkees one of the best groups of friends I ever had. I suppose Elizabeth, Katie, Melissa, and I might have bonded over something else, back in junior high, but Davy, Micky, Mike, and Peter were a good way. It makes me wish we were all back in Elizabeth's old house, or in Melissa's, eating Pringles or Twizzler Bites, wearing tie-dye, writing stories.
Also, here's to Davy Jones, may he rest in peace: I indirectly owe The Monkees one of the best groups of friends I ever had. I suppose Elizabeth, Katie, Melissa, and I might have bonded over something else, back in junior high, but Davy, Micky, Mike, and Peter were a good way. It makes me wish we were all back in Elizabeth's old house, or in Melissa's, eating Pringles or Twizzler Bites, wearing tie-dye, writing stories.
2.28.2012
I think I'm just not going to apologize anymore for most of the times I don't write.
Or for the titles that aren't title-capped, or whatever it's really called.
I helped out with youth group last night after something like a six-week hiatus, and the nicest thing was, the kids had actually missed me. I know it sounds low-self-esteemy to have thought that they wouldn't, but it's not like I'd thought they'd be glad that I was gone; I just thought it might not really hit their radar. I'm not one of the Good Shepherd Twenty-Somethings who enchants them (the girls love Jaime, and also Ife's girlfriend Lisa), and most of the time I only really help out with the Bible-study part, not the games. Youth ministry is not precisely my strong point. But they were glad to see me, and that was really nice. I even joined in Capture the Flag last night, which I almost never do, and ran around so much that I wished I'd taken my inhaler. After twenty-four years of no reactive-airway, or whatever it is, and being a person prone to bogus "illness" anyway, I keep thinking that I don't actually have it, that it's just me, but then I don't take my inhaler before running around, and my airways really do react, and suddenly it seems real after all. So. That's inconvenient.
Also, I just have more heart for the youth group after a six-week hiatus. Some things you can't leave or else you'll care even less about getting back to them, but in this case, I really am better for having had the break. Also, of course, it helps to know that the position is temporary (Ife and I have talked for a long time about my phasing out, for one thing), but all the same...I think I can do this for a while longer.
I helped out with youth group last night after something like a six-week hiatus, and the nicest thing was, the kids had actually missed me. I know it sounds low-self-esteemy to have thought that they wouldn't, but it's not like I'd thought they'd be glad that I was gone; I just thought it might not really hit their radar. I'm not one of the Good Shepherd Twenty-Somethings who enchants them (the girls love Jaime, and also Ife's girlfriend Lisa), and most of the time I only really help out with the Bible-study part, not the games. Youth ministry is not precisely my strong point. But they were glad to see me, and that was really nice. I even joined in Capture the Flag last night, which I almost never do, and ran around so much that I wished I'd taken my inhaler. After twenty-four years of no reactive-airway, or whatever it is, and being a person prone to bogus "illness" anyway, I keep thinking that I don't actually have it, that it's just me, but then I don't take my inhaler before running around, and my airways really do react, and suddenly it seems real after all. So. That's inconvenient.
Also, I just have more heart for the youth group after a six-week hiatus. Some things you can't leave or else you'll care even less about getting back to them, but in this case, I really am better for having had the break. Also, of course, it helps to know that the position is temporary (Ife and I have talked for a long time about my phasing out, for one thing), but all the same...I think I can do this for a while longer.
2.25.2012
More on Food
Here is how my cooking sometimes is: last night, making dinner took about two hours, and it was fresh and tasty. But tonight, I kid you not, I made baked beans on toast (for serious - it's a real meal, though it's considered British rather than American) and drank most of a bottled smoothie with it. Prep time: Maybe five or six minutes, at least for the first serving. I had to heat the beans, and I had to toast the toast. And before spooning on the beans, I had spread (because clearly this story wasn't embarrassing enough) leftover bacon grease on most of the toast in lieu of butter, partly because refrigerated bacon grease is always way more spreadable that refrigerated butter, and partly because bacon grease tastes good on toast.
As you can imagine, Carrie hasn't been home for the past two evenings. But she doesn't even like baked beans - which is actually one reason why I made them tonight.
Later, I unexpectedly ate some spaghetti and homemade sauce (Jerry had made it) with Jerry, Tuttle, Tuttle's-girlfriend-Jamie, and Lauren (at the guys' place, not mine). So it turned out to be a sizeable dinner.
Also related to food, tomorrow night Carrie and I are, in fact, going to Tuttle's Oscars party. I know very little about movies, but I usually stay quiet rather than asking lots of questions, so that keeps me on Tuttle's "invitable" list. Granted, usually I'm quiet because my usual strategy at parties is to eat and drink everything I possibly can within the realm of politeness, but it's a system, and it appears to be working. Each guest has been asked to contribute some food or beverage if possible, of course; I think I'll make some no-knead bread and maybe some cinnamon-sugar butter to go along with it.
As you can imagine, Carrie hasn't been home for the past two evenings. But she doesn't even like baked beans - which is actually one reason why I made them tonight.
Later, I unexpectedly ate some spaghetti and homemade sauce (Jerry had made it) with Jerry, Tuttle, Tuttle's-girlfriend-Jamie, and Lauren (at the guys' place, not mine). So it turned out to be a sizeable dinner.
Also related to food, tomorrow night Carrie and I are, in fact, going to Tuttle's Oscars party. I know very little about movies, but I usually stay quiet rather than asking lots of questions, so that keeps me on Tuttle's "invitable" list. Granted, usually I'm quiet because my usual strategy at parties is to eat and drink everything I possibly can within the realm of politeness, but it's a system, and it appears to be working. Each guest has been asked to contribute some food or beverage if possible, of course; I think I'll make some no-knead bread and maybe some cinnamon-sugar butter to go along with it.
2.24.2012
Meatless, Labor-Intensive, and Tasty
Today, after a fairly productive day, I had a sizeable snack, because it was already about 5:30 and I hadn't started dinner yet. Then, to the smooth tones of All Things Considered and Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz (the latter of which I only sort of listened to, I admit), I made Mexican Pepper Casserole, out of my mom's Moosewood Restaurant cookbook (which I borrowed when I was up at my parents' house earlier this week).
It's not a quick meal. Just slicing two cups of onion and maybe two-and-a-half pounds' worth of bell peppers (in a variety of colors) took a long darn time, especially since I decided to get cute at Wegmans this week and buy a bag of mini bell peppers because they were much cheaper by weight than individual peppers, not thinking about what it would take to slice them all. (And, in fact, I didn't - I sliced most of them, but I also dumped some frozen green pepper in there.) I tried seeing whether my mandoline would help, but it didn't really save me any labor, even with the onion, since said onion was so big that it basically had to be quartered before I could get any of it onto the holder.
Besides that, you've got to fry the onions (and some garlic) and then the peppers with some salt and pepper and spices (cumin, coriander, dry mustard), and you've got to shred cheese (unless the kind you want is already in sandwich-style slices), as well as mix plain yogurt (or sour cream - or, in my case, use some of each) and eggs together in a bowl (learn from me: choose a bigger bowl than you think you'll need). By the way, you should also be preheating the oven and spraying a baking dish (Katzen said 10x10, but we have no such thing, so I went for a 9x13, which worked fine).
Eventually, you put the softened fried peppers into the baking dish (actually, I was supposed to mix some flour into them while they were frying, but I forgot; it seems not to've been too big a deal), pour the egg-and-dairy mixture over them, and sprinkle the cheese over the top. Then you bake it for a good forty minutes. You may, as I did, decide to cook some brown rice during this time (and by "cook" I mean "stick it in our rice cooker, push the button down, and go do something else"), but it's not really necessary.
When it comes out, it looks a little like a big quiche or something - eggy stuff in there, cheese on top, some vegetables. Maybe it was that most of the peppers were fresh, or maybe the yogurt lent it some nice flavor, but it was nice - lighter than a quiche would be, and tasty.
I do have another pile of dirty dishes to wash. But I ate the casserole with rice and drank milk, reading all the while, and afterwards made some good hot chocolate. It was a good meal (with plenty left over), and life felt kind to me.
It's not a quick meal. Just slicing two cups of onion and maybe two-and-a-half pounds' worth of bell peppers (in a variety of colors) took a long darn time, especially since I decided to get cute at Wegmans this week and buy a bag of mini bell peppers because they were much cheaper by weight than individual peppers, not thinking about what it would take to slice them all. (And, in fact, I didn't - I sliced most of them, but I also dumped some frozen green pepper in there.) I tried seeing whether my mandoline would help, but it didn't really save me any labor, even with the onion, since said onion was so big that it basically had to be quartered before I could get any of it onto the holder.
Besides that, you've got to fry the onions (and some garlic) and then the peppers with some salt and pepper and spices (cumin, coriander, dry mustard), and you've got to shred cheese (unless the kind you want is already in sandwich-style slices), as well as mix plain yogurt (or sour cream - or, in my case, use some of each) and eggs together in a bowl (learn from me: choose a bigger bowl than you think you'll need). By the way, you should also be preheating the oven and spraying a baking dish (Katzen said 10x10, but we have no such thing, so I went for a 9x13, which worked fine).
Eventually, you put the softened fried peppers into the baking dish (actually, I was supposed to mix some flour into them while they were frying, but I forgot; it seems not to've been too big a deal), pour the egg-and-dairy mixture over them, and sprinkle the cheese over the top. Then you bake it for a good forty minutes. You may, as I did, decide to cook some brown rice during this time (and by "cook" I mean "stick it in our rice cooker, push the button down, and go do something else"), but it's not really necessary.
When it comes out, it looks a little like a big quiche or something - eggy stuff in there, cheese on top, some vegetables. Maybe it was that most of the peppers were fresh, or maybe the yogurt lent it some nice flavor, but it was nice - lighter than a quiche would be, and tasty.
I do have another pile of dirty dishes to wash. But I ate the casserole with rice and drank milk, reading all the while, and afterwards made some good hot chocolate. It was a good meal (with plenty left over), and life felt kind to me.
2.23.2012
In a Hurry
I should still have explained, yesterday, some general stuff about Lent, even if not at much length. But I didn't, and now I suspect that I won't. Though I certainly will if you have questions, even skeptical ones (such as, "You mean you're supposed to feel bad about yourself for forty days?" And, no, not exactly, though I may have made it sound like that).
Today was productive. Also, my car's finished passing its inspection.
Today was productive. Also, my car's finished passing its inspection.
2.22.2012
Christ Jesus Came into the World to Save Sinners...
It's Ash Wednesday, the day when Christians begin Lent, a forty-day period of, among other things, identifying and trying to root out specific sinful patterns of behavior in their lives - by God's grace and with His help.
So here's what I did early this afternoon: I wrote an entry for this blog, detailing why we do Lent and how I personally planned to celebrate it.
In writing it, I knowingly made myself twenty-five minutes late for a Red-Cross-sponsored shopping errand I'd promised to run somebody. We'd agreed on two, but I was absorbed in crafting my entry, and so I let myself be late, since I know her already and I'd figured, more or less correctly, that she wouldn't really care.
But it was still a problem, because Weis ended up being crowded, and I ended up having so many questions about the shopping list that I had to call, and the deli section was crowded, so that part took a long time, and the cheese apparently fell out of my cart and I had to run to get more once I'd already put the other stuff on the checkout belt, and I hadn't bothered to ask about whether it ought to be white or yellow cheese, so I'd gotten the wrong one, and it made me forget the city garbage bags, which you have to ask for at the checkout. Because of all this and another part of the errand, I got to a local Chinese restaurant an hour late to pick up a Chinese food order the lady had put in; had I known there would be one, I would've tried harder to've been on time, though somehow it was still hot by the time I paid for it.
Also, in writing the original blog entry? I neglected two other things I was supposed to be doing today, and now may not be able to at all because of how differently today's schedule has become than how I'd meant for it to be this morning, when I woke up - which was about 6:20, since I'd slept through the time I'd originally meant to use for showering.
Not that every mishap I've just detailed across this whole entry directly reflects my own sinful nature, I know. But enough of it does that I'm pretty sure that what you don't need is a careful and perky explanation of why Christians do Lent. We do Lent because we blow off meeting times because we're busy trying to explain communal efforts towards holiness, and because usually, when we don't read our Bibles or write to/call our significant others or get our cars' emissions tests when we're supposed to, it's for lame reasons instead of good ones.
And possibly also because, even knowing those things, instead of doing something concrete about them in the time we do have, the first thing some of us do instead is write a whole other blog entry about it, before anyone sees the first one. It's all sort of funny, especially because nothing actually terrible followed in consequence, but still...oh, man. And oh, mankind.
So here's what I did early this afternoon: I wrote an entry for this blog, detailing why we do Lent and how I personally planned to celebrate it.
In writing it, I knowingly made myself twenty-five minutes late for a Red-Cross-sponsored shopping errand I'd promised to run somebody. We'd agreed on two, but I was absorbed in crafting my entry, and so I let myself be late, since I know her already and I'd figured, more or less correctly, that she wouldn't really care.
But it was still a problem, because Weis ended up being crowded, and I ended up having so many questions about the shopping list that I had to call, and the deli section was crowded, so that part took a long time, and the cheese apparently fell out of my cart and I had to run to get more once I'd already put the other stuff on the checkout belt, and I hadn't bothered to ask about whether it ought to be white or yellow cheese, so I'd gotten the wrong one, and it made me forget the city garbage bags, which you have to ask for at the checkout. Because of all this and another part of the errand, I got to a local Chinese restaurant an hour late to pick up a Chinese food order the lady had put in; had I known there would be one, I would've tried harder to've been on time, though somehow it was still hot by the time I paid for it.
Also, in writing the original blog entry? I neglected two other things I was supposed to be doing today, and now may not be able to at all because of how differently today's schedule has become than how I'd meant for it to be this morning, when I woke up - which was about 6:20, since I'd slept through the time I'd originally meant to use for showering.
Not that every mishap I've just detailed across this whole entry directly reflects my own sinful nature, I know. But enough of it does that I'm pretty sure that what you don't need is a careful and perky explanation of why Christians do Lent. We do Lent because we blow off meeting times because we're busy trying to explain communal efforts towards holiness, and because usually, when we don't read our Bibles or write to/call our significant others or get our cars' emissions tests when we're supposed to, it's for lame reasons instead of good ones.
And possibly also because, even knowing those things, instead of doing something concrete about them in the time we do have, the first thing some of us do instead is write a whole other blog entry about it, before anyone sees the first one. It's all sort of funny, especially because nothing actually terrible followed in consequence, but still...oh, man. And oh, mankind.
2.21.2012
Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras
I meant to write you a lovely post about coming into church this evening just past the time of the Shrove Tuesday dinner and being greeted by the smell of incense and burned palms (by the way, I generally don't love the smell of incense, and I'm not even sure whether I like the smell of the stuff we burn on significant occasions at church, but either way, I'm glad we do it) and people upstairs and downstairs, doing what they do. It's a great place.
But then I didn't get on the computer for a while because I was having a fun talk with Carrie, and then I read blogs and Facebook and stuff, and almost forgot more than once that I myself still had to blog. So instead you get this: I'm back in Binghamton. Rhode Island was truly very good. My car has been inspected and has mostly passed (after the car's computer resets itself, it'll pass the emissions test and I'll get my for-real sticker instead of temporary count-this-as-passing printouts to show if I ever get pulled over).
And I have to get up at, like, six AM tomorrow, or even earlier if I'm smart, so as to be at church by seven for Ash Wednesday. I should be asleep right now, but a cold has deprived me of sleep deeply enough over the past several days that I could hardly help letting myself catch up on it for twoish hours this afternoon - so tired that I didn't even think to put up my hair, which was still quite damp from a shower, before I fell asleep. So I wasn't quite tired enough for bed by ten tonight, I don't think, though I think I am now. We'll see whether I end up feeling like the embodied consequences of all my sins tomorrow morning, or what.
Blessed Lenten season to you all, and good night.
But then I didn't get on the computer for a while because I was having a fun talk with Carrie, and then I read blogs and Facebook and stuff, and almost forgot more than once that I myself still had to blog. So instead you get this: I'm back in Binghamton. Rhode Island was truly very good. My car has been inspected and has mostly passed (after the car's computer resets itself, it'll pass the emissions test and I'll get my for-real sticker instead of temporary count-this-as-passing printouts to show if I ever get pulled over).
And I have to get up at, like, six AM tomorrow, or even earlier if I'm smart, so as to be at church by seven for Ash Wednesday. I should be asleep right now, but a cold has deprived me of sleep deeply enough over the past several days that I could hardly help letting myself catch up on it for twoish hours this afternoon - so tired that I didn't even think to put up my hair, which was still quite damp from a shower, before I fell asleep. So I wasn't quite tired enough for bed by ten tonight, I don't think, though I think I am now. We'll see whether I end up feeling like the embodied consequences of all my sins tomorrow morning, or what.
Blessed Lenten season to you all, and good night.
2.20.2012
Back, in Brief
I was in Rhode Island over the long weekend, but I'm back in New York now.
Tomorrow I'm getting my car inspected, since I kind of forgot that that was supposed to happen back in January. I'm also looking forward to sleeping in.
This has been your report for tonight.
Tomorrow I'm getting my car inspected, since I kind of forgot that that was supposed to happen back in January. I'm also looking forward to sleeping in.
This has been your report for tonight.
2.16.2012
Returns
Tonight was an evening of returns: the unused (and unopened) birthday napkins to Maines, two unsuitable purchases to Target (in case you were wondering, no, I haven't found it worth it to buy things online, even though I was trying to take advantage of the last day of a sale after normal store hours had ended...though, on the plus side, everything shipped quickly), and my soon-to-be-due library materials. I am now some $34.66-or-so richer (well, until you subtract $8ish worth of Wegmans purchases), though I may soon have to spend much of that on a new hair dryer, unless it's just our upstairs-bathroom outlet being weird again.
Now it is my intention to have a snack and clean the kitchen and downstairs bathroom.
Now it is my intention to have a snack and clean the kitchen and downstairs bathroom.
2.15.2012
Sidebar Addition
Tonight I was given gifts of free food: a beautiful homemade wheat roll from Elisabeth (seriously, who needs butter, or any adornment whatsoever, when the roll itself is just so good? I didn't. I ate it in the car, savoring it) and pieces of pastry/cake/whatever from the Culinary Institute of America. The latter I got from Ife, who had brought them to share with people (actually, one of them I got a piece of even though Carrie, who had received it, had been encouraged not to share it); while visiting his girlfriend (which I believe happened yesterday, but presumably also part of today), they had toured the Institute, so he'd brought back samples. So all this food was unexpected and tasted very good.
Speaking of Elisabeth, I'm adding her new blog to my sidebar. Said blog is called "Sunshine Chronicles," and it will chronicle ten months she spends, with AmeriCorps, in a place that (unlike Binghamton) probably gets a lot of sunshine. Maybe that's the reason for the name. Well, no, more likely it's because she wants to help bring light to a place in darkness (largely metaphorical, that is - poverty, both economic and spiritual). Still, you can tell that it's a title that works on multiple levels.
With that, I'm going to go to bed, because not long after the sun rises tomorrow, I'd like to be up - and rested.
Speaking of Elisabeth, I'm adding her new blog to my sidebar. Said blog is called "Sunshine Chronicles," and it will chronicle ten months she spends, with AmeriCorps, in a place that (unlike Binghamton) probably gets a lot of sunshine. Maybe that's the reason for the name. Well, no, more likely it's because she wants to help bring light to a place in darkness (largely metaphorical, that is - poverty, both economic and spiritual). Still, you can tell that it's a title that works on multiple levels.
With that, I'm going to go to bed, because not long after the sun rises tomorrow, I'd like to be up - and rested.