Books, Home, Humor September 9, 2009September 9, 2009

I Could Never Be a Librarian…

“I cannot live without books.”
-Thomas Jefferson

We bought (another) bookshelf some time ago but just got it secured to a wall in our office a couple nights ago. It was nine thirty in the evening and we were both exhausted, but I pulled almost all our books out to reorganize them to use all that glorious additional space we’d acquired. Not as easy as you might think.

Should I sort alphabetically? If so, by title or author? What about by color of book cover? Size? Hardback vs. Paperback? Topic? Gah! What was a bibliophile to do?

toomanybooks I eventually decided on chronology, starting with Homer, Virgil, and Beowulf (remember how I majored in European Studies with an emphasis on literary history?…) working my way through Geoffrey of Monmouth, Dante, and Petrarch, and got on rather well until I butted into the sixteenth century. I stared down at my copy of The Other Boleyn Girl and then frowned at the space it should go for a while before setting it down in a new pile. I could not, in good conscious, wedge it between Sir Thomas More and John Donne. I didn’t even get a full century ahead of that before I ground to a halt again. Rousseau, Voltaire, Manon Lescaut, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and…The Scarlet Pimpernel? Hm, a better fit than the Boleyn Girl, but still didn’t seem quite right.
“Are these supposed to go in order of subject matter or when they were written?” I demanded of J. as he obligingly carted books around the flat for me.
“I have no idea what you’re doing,” he returned, disappearing into the office with my anthologies, essays, and critical works.
“Me neither!”

The same problem with C. S. Lewis, as well as the fact that I have works from him that fall both in fantasy and theology, neither genre had previously featured. I tucked The Chronicles of Narnia with my science fiction, Lois McMaster Bujold and Douglas Adams…and then realized I had no idea where any of them should go chronologically! “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” didn’t necessarily come after post-modernism in my mind. And what about all my academic books, J.’s philosphy and textbooks?

I finally got it all sorted, but with an additional bookshelf not all of the available space is used. Which means of course a run to the campus bookstore (hurrah for employee discounts!) and Barnes and Noble is in order!

Humor, School September 8, 2009

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

“Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take off their shirts in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.”
-Dave Barry

funny-pictures-cat-intercepts Having grown up in places where “football” meant something very different from it does here, as well as having parents that never really followed sports, meant I was unprepared for American Football when I came to the western United States for university. Jane, my first roommate in the dorms, convinced me to by a student all season ticket so that I could go to the games with her, but I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect.
“It’s the stupidest concept,” I whined, “a bunch of guys get into lines and run into each other on purpose! What’s the point?”
Nevertheless Jane painted my face, made me buy the appropriately colored tee shirt, and on game day we hiked to the university stadium. Half an hour later I was screaming just as loudly as anyone else.

I’ll never be converted to the NFL (although I’ve developed a taste for Superbowl parties…or maybe just the snacks…) because I think that people who get paid obscene amounts of money to get a ball from Point A to Point B, the methods vary, have a severely warped sense of reality. But I have grown to love collegiate sports for the rivalries, the solidarity, and the love of the game.

The only problem I have with my university’s football games is that my favorite coat is the color of our fiercest rivals. So I do the logical thing. Freeze. I’m officially one of the faithful.

Humor, Marriage September 4, 2009September 4, 2009

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

“My son complains about headaches. I tell him all the time, when you get out of bed, it’s feet first!”
-Henry Youngman

Unlike many people, J. and I did not live together before we got married which, besides other learning curves, presented us with an amusing problem: learning to share a bed. I lived in our flat alone for months before the wedding and so, after years of university dorm room or ghetto student housing mattresses, I justifiably learned quickly to sleep in the middle of our/my shiny new queen size. Arms stretched wide just because I could. Not so handy when your new over-a-foot-taller-than-you husband moves in!

Nearly every morning one of us delivers a laundry list of blunt trauma accusations to the other. “You kneed me at three in the morning!” “How, exactly did you manage to wake up on the other side of the bed?” “You nearly butted me out of bed, I woke up looking at the the floor.” “Where’d you think I got that bruise from?” “You elbowed me in the face!” etc…

Apart from the normal co-habitation hazards, there’s a new threat. J. has either developed a creative (i.e. sadistic) way to get me up in the morning, or has simply forgotten to turn off his phone alarm. See, my alarm wakes me up to the soothing sounds of Madeleine Peyroux or Adele. J.’s phone alarm sounds, to my sleep foggy ears, like a nuclear attack warning.

Small Dog spazzes, and J. wonders about this creature he married.

However I feel as though I have had the last laugh. Three days ago, when this awful sound catapulted me into wakefulness for the first time, I sort of panicked. And by panicked, I mean flailed. The act of which got J. soundly punched. I felt badly afterwards…a long time afterwards because, being the antithesis of a morning person, a tiny part of my morning-hating soul wanted to believe he deserved it.

Family, Home, Humor, School, Shopping September 2, 2009September 2, 2009

Why Yes, I Am Awesome, Thanks

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
-A. Heinlein

busy guy Yesterday was the second day of school and I had already made a life changing discovery: my husband will, for all intents and purposes, be dead to me for the next few years. He’s in class from 8-12, then in the library from 12-5 when I’m done with work. We go home, one of us contrives to make something edible, and then I take him back to campus for study groups/work on projects/meet and greet representatives from large firms trying to seduce the students early on/whatever else is going on that night. Then he has homework until at least 11.

So in response, I’m doing what I do best. Mobilizing!

Last night with Venice’s help (J. was at a firm reps meeting) I put together the shelving we bought for the kitchen. Living, as we do, in the ghetto of our university town (it’s not that bad, just old. Nearly fossilized, in fact) we have two cupboards in our kitchen, and the shelves in them are bowed with age. Putting cans or even plates on them for as long as we have has been supremely of foolish of us, but necessity being the mother of desperation, we put off getting shelves for a while. No more! The kitchen is cleaned and organized and, if all goes well, it will stay that way.

I went shopping for food, inspired by the ever fabulous Hammy (Hat Tip to her for this idea!) and loaded up a bowl on our table with snacks. I bough an armload of Ramen and instant macaroni and cheese for days when neither J. or I will be able to muster the strength to make lunches. I’ve stocked up on crock pot ingredients which can all be dumped in together on my lunch break so we have something to eat during the approximate 4.6 seconds J. has at home.

Don't get be wrong...I'm sure a breakdown is coming...I just choose to ignore it.

Tonight I’m doing laundry and taking on the migratory herd of cardboard boxes that have been accumulating since our wedding, they’ve been making the rounds through our entire flat and have been grazing on whatever it is cardboard boxes eat in our office for weeks now. Said herd shall be thinned, ruthlessly. I already bought an office filing contraption and have moved critical things like marriage certificates, tax info, and the like in (partly to get it out of the pile on my desk, but mostly to keep J. from throwing it away again).

Why the frenzy, you ask? First of all a house in order is easier to keep in order long term, so if both mine and J.’s potential chore-doing ability has evaporated, let’s get the house put together before one of us has a breakdown rendering us incapable of sustained linear though. Second because it really needed to be done, I’ve been putting the house off since we got married. Third? Because I am an AWESOME wife! Who knew?

Humor, Snark, Work September 1, 2009

Kids These Days!

“‘So, I’m like, a new student? And I like need a parking permit? Do I like, get that like here?'”
“Wow. You are scary good at that voice…”
-C., mocking the freshman, TenFour being scared

University is like, hard and stuff! LOL!

Seriously! Do these girls only speak in questions, or do they just naturally intone upwards at the end of sentences? I am getting emails sans punctuation, sans capitalization, sans everything! Numbers used as letters, emoticons, and oh the misspellings. How exactly did they get into university, one might inquire?

Listening to them talk as they walk across campus is mind-numbing. Between slang and poor grammar, you can barely understand what they’re saying. The word “like” features heavily, conjunctions do not (I’m looking at you, Venice, as a English and grammar teacher to correct this is your rising seventh graders)

These kids even dress badly, attempted Vogue meets train wreck (and not Vivienne Westwood style, either). They don’t read signs that direct them where to go on campus. They get in an unbelievable amount of car wrecks. Their bikes get impounded when they chain them to “Please Lock Your Bike On A Rack Or It Will Be Impounded” signs. They can’t make eye contact because they’re texting incessantly.

To these kids, the Berlin Wall has only existed in history text books!

Holy crap, listen to me! I’m a GEEZER at 23…

Drama, Friends, Home, Humor, Snark August 26, 2009August 26, 2009

The Tale of the Demon Baby

“You know those shows? The one where the foreign nanny comes to fix the broken, angry kids and they all scream a certain way? That’s what the kid sounds like.”
-J.

In the flat in between mine and Venice’s dwells a couple. About a year ago, this seemingly normal couple spawned and the wife was brought to bed of an apparently fine boy. However as the weeks went by, it became increasingly obvious to all (except the parents) that there was something wrong…

This evil baby communicates in a charming fake British accent... — This evil baby communicates in an understandable, if fake British accent...

To boil down months of annoyance and sleepless nights to a single sentence, the child is a Screamer. And he has somehow mastered the dark art of knowing exactly when a neighbor is nodding off. Or when it’s 3a.m. Or when you’re carrying something easily breakable and likely to be dropped at the sound of a sudden shriek. Or if it senses smiles and happiness, which the Creature cannot abide.

As rotten luck would have it his bedroom abuts Venice and Val’s, but they aren’t the only victims to this child’s nightly symphonies. Our building is made of three rows of four flats…and everyone one of us can hear the baby. And we have no idea what his parents are doing because he screams for hours at a time and it sounds like no one picks him up or anything, he just lies in his bed and makes his misery heard. I myself have rarely glimpsed Demon Baby out in daylight, just a couple of times while his parents were putting him (screaming) into his car seat. J. says that he’s seen them walking around the neighborhood and the kid, when not screaming, sill has a perma-scowl. It apparently hates the world.

...this baby communicates through sheer rage.

A couple of tenets have casually mentioned it to our landlords, but most of us are keeping mum. Partly because it’s a delicate business making one’s frustrations with one’s neighbors known…and partly because our landlord and his wife are themselves expecting their first child any second now and no one wants to fill the soon-to-be mother with horrible worries. Even though she herself has expressed concern that she will give birth to Demon Baby 2.0. Pray for us all.

Friends, Humor, Work August 25, 2009November 3, 2009

Observations of a Grump

“Common sense is not so common.”
-Voltaire

bad day A couple things that I noticed today because I’m (still) in a rather bad mood and grouchy towards the silliness of my job. Such an attitude invariably spills over into other aspects of life and I do recognize that I need to snap out of it soon. I’ll put on rose colored glasses again shortly, but meanwhile I’m still way too irritated!

1) In spite of the hiring freeze the University has imposed on every department, they were still able to give all employees a raise, which was rather lovely. However it was my job to individually calibrate and apply said raise to all 150+ of our student employees, which was rather horrible. And despite several emails to student employee supervisors warning them that this project would take several days and that they would have to get any other wage changes to me before then, a pile of “so-sorry-I’m-late-but-it’-just-been-crazy-and-don’t-you-look-nice-today-could-you-possibly-help-me-out” paperwork stealthily grew on my desk. Which was rather irritating, but manageable. However, today a new bunch of supervisor raises appeared on my desk and one kid, when you add up all his raises together, is getting a 10% wage increase because (and this I quote from the supervisor comment section of the form), “He has improved very much. He now diligently wears black socks.” This kid will end up making nearly as much as me because he has finally learned to match his footwear to the black shoes, pants, and belt his uniform requires?! (*teeth grind*)

2) Even after many requests, nigh unto begging, they still will not update the office website! Currently people trying to muddle through our new (still now quite functioning) parking monitoring program call the number listed on the parking and traffic website…which sends them straight to my phone. However hearing, “University police,this is C.,” tends to make people start panicking a little. (*head shake*)

duh_award1 3) And it’s not just work being ridiculous! Driving to work today I heard a commercial. “The current credit crunch and recession making it hard for you to buy a car or house? Something drastic must be done! We have bailout money for YOU YOU YOU! Good credit, bad, credit, no credit? High income, low income? Doesn’t matter, you WILL be approved for your big purchase!”

Now…wasn’t it the poor decisions on the part of lenders/banks/credit companies to lend people money that they didn’t qualify for (coupled with people thinking that their actual income should not be a factor in purchases) that got this country in the financial mess it’s in? (*facepalm*)

There! I finally feel purged of the angst! At least, I’ve complained myself hoarse, and that tends to make for a bad dinner conversation, I’m pretty sure my poor in-laws got an ear-full of it sunday night, to say nothing of my long-suffering husband! I’m grabbing dinner with Catriona tonight who apparently has much to gossip about, (but won’t even give me any hints as to what, the minx!) so I have to be in prime perked ears position. Vent-fest over.

Drama, Humor, Life, Work August 20, 2009August 20, 2009

Office Worker: n. resident of Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell

“Is it just me, or is this whole thing going to Hell in a hand basket?”
“Just wave your magic wand and make it all better.”
“How about a stapler? I have one of those and I think it packs more of a punch when it hits.”
-C. and Officer Lampost

One upon a time, the parking office, which is not controlled by the police department, had a novel idea. “Why don’t we,” they said to one another, “do away with this medieval notion of parking permits that you stick on your window or hang from your mirror and instead invest millions of dollars in a new digital license plate reader system that will simply take a picture of the plate, compare the info to a database, and automatically write tickets!”
“Brilliant!” said University Administration. “But hey, folks, we are in the middle of a recession. Is this a good idea?”
“Sure,” said the Parking Powers, “it will only cost XXX amount of money, require fewer man hours to run, and reduce costs all around.”
“How economical!” exclaimed the University, “Go for it!”

futility Six months later…the Office of IT had not even started writing the program, the bare bones equipment was costing three times more than projected, we had to hire even more people to keep the office running, supervisors were not listening to the traffic and parking clerks when they explained what they needed in the new system, no one had thought that perhaps students/faculty coming to this university might be coming from out of state/country and so the program would need a way to account for that, and days away from the new system going live, the office hadn’t even received a prototype of the program to run.

Ergo, this whole week the entire office has been overrun with techie-types (and everyone of them with the stereotypical thick glasses, receding hairlines, and nasally voices…it’s been weird) scampering about frantically trying to patch a program they didn’t know they had to write, written in a matter of a couple of weeks, and left with enough holes in it that it might legally qualify as a sieve.

Sorry, IT guys, e-card just aren't going to cut it...

The funny bit in this mess is how the IT guys seem to be trying to apologize for their blunders. The office has spent the week overrun with flowers, balloons, sugary treats, and take out meals. I would just like to have been a fly on the wall while they were working this out…
“Crap, guys, we’ve screwed it up royally and now we have an office full of women all barking mad to get this thing online and absolutely furious with us. Brainstorm, quick! Best way to make it up?”
“They’re women! Flowers and chocolate all the way, dude!”

I don’t even work for the parking division, but I would hazard a guess that as much as the girls are enjoying the perks of having a dozen erring husbands groveling for forgiveness…they might prefer the new system working instead.

stupidity_1170973245 — Can you exorcise this stuff? Fingers crossed!

And in continuing office news, after the Rising of the Secretaries (spearheaded by yours truly) and ample warning, I am wheeling out the guillotine! Today all unclaimed lockers and uniforms will be confiscated, gear will be redistributed to kids who are actually working, all paperwork will be filed and discrepancies will be punished. At noon we attack!

Family, Humor, Life, Weird August 12, 2009August 12, 2009

Pregnancy. Scares.

“I myself prefer dogs.”
–Catherine Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman

Ever since getting married (a grand total of a month and a half ago) I wait with baited breath for Mother Nature to confirm that I’m not pregnant every 28 days. That’s right, I actively look forward to That Time of the Month to reassure myself that a Mini C./J. is not in the works. In days leading up to it I get unbelievably tense and engage in ridiculous conversations that I’m guaranteed to regret 4-5 days later.
“Does this milk smell off? …CRAP! I’m pregnant!”
“No you’re not,” says J. with an irritated but still loving roll of the eyes. “The milk’s bad.”
“Oh.” (Goes back to pouring cereal)

While he's blithely unaffected, I'm getting haunting visions of THIS!

Occasionally I can border on the paranoid. The first month after marriage I was “late,” which mean two whole days of angst that I think I hid well but during which I secretly gnawed my metaphoric nails to the wrist.
“What if I’m pregnant?” I demanded morbidly one night as we brushed our teeth.
“You’re not,” J. said (again, and just as irritated/patiently).
“But what if I am?!”
“Well, that’ll certainly change things.”
“How can you be so calm??!!” I hissed.
“About a purely hypothetical situation?” he countered.

I trust he would be a better father than this...

See, even though it would “change things,” I don’t think J.’s world would be rocked to the core if the Fates decided to play this horrid, horrid joke on us. But then again, he’s not the one who would have to host this alien parasite for nine months, forcibly expel it, and then still find a way to be the primary breadwinner for our family in addition to a full time parent. I’m a tough girl, I can handle quite a bit, but the mere thought of that last scenario makes my knees knock in quivering terror.

And I’m sorry, I don’t even find babies cute! Anathema, I know…but just think about it! They’ve got these big alien heads they can’t support, they don’t communicate (in any language I speak, or will until I do decide to breed), and if there is an opening in their body anywhere, something gross is coming out of it. I like little kids better. I’ll take the Terrible Two’s over the Irrevocably-Broken-If-I-Touch-It Infants any day of the week!

Now, before I’m burned at the stake, I know I’m going to think my own children have been individually sprinkled with awesome dust. I’ll probably even think they’re cute in spite of the many varieties of goo seeping out of them (my husband’s a fine piece of work, if I do say so myself, and I don’t look like a horse, so the odds are in our favor). Just…not yet. Not for a few years. Not while he’s in school, not while I still have to work, and not while the idea still turns me into a catatonic mess.

And even though deep down I can admit I look forward to having a family with J. (a long way down the road), I suspect in the meantime, every 28 days, I’ll be going through this same process of fear, soul searching, and grudging resignation. At least I am assured of one ally.
“How long is this going to go on?” I whined to Venice after Scare #1.
She came back with a chipper, “12 times a year. Enjoy!”

Humor, Work August 11, 2009

Hostile Takeover

“I feel sure that coups d’etat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what is happening and not miss anything.”
-Edmond and Jules to Goncourt

The title is misleading. If anything I’m staging a “Mildly Irritated Reworking of Procedure” in the office, with Hennessy, Wise, and Susie. With the upcoming school year we have dozens of students to be hired, fired, given raises, etc., but the problem is that the supervisors in our department are notorious for not telling me when students quit or are fired. Then end result is that I think that lockers assigned to students are still in use, gear is still checked out, the kids aren’t hired properly (the procedures of which are federally regulated, meaning that mistakes equal risking one mother of an audit bill), wages get screwed up, and all the secretaries go home with migraines.

But no more! We have rounded up the ringleaders (mandatory meeting), studied the mistakes of the past (reviewed suggestions from a similar meeting that took place last year, all of which have been subsequently ignored by the powers that be), barricaded off the exits (cancelled all other events) and put our fates in the hands of a higher power (got Chief on our side). Liberté, Égalité…er…Sororité?

Small Dog Syndrome