“A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.”
– Elbert Hubbard
I think that makes us a committee. My house looks like this:
And as I type this a strange man is attempting to free style rap outside my door in an extremely nasally voice. Less than a week, minions.
“Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.”
~Charles Simmons
A child lives above us and it’s been affecting me, not in cute baby ways. This baby must have something wrong with it, possibly really bad colic, and it screams for hours at a time, day and night – but mostly night. I haven’t had three hours unbroken sleep in weeks, but lately it’s been getting even worse both as to noise (which was pretty loud to start with) and duration (which was nothing to sneeze at either). I’ve tried moving to every room of the flat to sleep except the bathroom but it doesn’t work, nowhere is safe.
This whole past week I was sick from lack of sleep. I lost my voice for a while and had to call in for two days, apparently one day leaving a supremely loopy message on my supervisor’s answering machine much to the hilarity of my coworkers. Today I slept until nearly two – completely spacing a lunch date with a friend – who, weirdly enough, had a prophetic dream in which I had to cancel and then saw from a Facebook post from a couple days ago that I was ill and when I didn’t return texts to confirm assumed I was knocked out cold. Which I was. Apparently some of her ESP rubbed off on me because I woke up mere minutes after her phone call and was able to grovel appropriately and reschedule for an early dinner, but I missed a phone call from my sister-in-law inviting us to a nephew’s birthday party dinner tomorrow.
As I type this now, in the mid afternoon, the infernal child is wailing.
I’m exhausted, and I can’t even imagine how the poor parents are coping! I’m pretty sure at least one of them is a student at the university and this is finals week. This is not how I imagined wrapping up my last couple weeks at work and packing up the house…
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
This has been a rough week, kittens, lots of bad things happened in a lot of places, some of which are still shaking out. Stay safe out there, everyone, and here are your links:
An article on the perpetual love for the Longchamp Le Pliage bag – I’m an admitted devotee.
People. Inherently decent.
I can’t even stay upright on skis!
I watched this Frontline episode this past week. I’ve joked in the past that we are poor, but never again. Not after watching this. I’ve lived in truly poverty stricken areas of the globe before but it’s been a while and I honestly think I forget how grim it was for the members of my various communities, even those who bore hardship with stunning grace and resilience. My pay might be small now, and about to go from regular to project based, but except for a couple of hurricanes disrupting things in my teens, I have never gone hungry in my life. I have clothes on my back, a roof over my head, and the ability to provide for myself, I am never going to refer to myself as poor again unless I am facing the challenges these kids face. Perspective. Also looking into some volunteer opportunities this summer because I can do more.
I’d try some of these recipes.
Please consider giving a blood donation to your local donation center if you can. Chronic blood shortages are pretty common, but it gets worse after any large tragedies.
Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.
~ Richard Rorty
This week was long. My trainee requires constant supervision and the universe seems determined to keep me from getting my personal projects done in other ways too. We received a phone call out of the blue yesterday asking to see our flat, and when I stated that I had not advertised it, the caller said, “Oh, yeah, I got your number from your managers.” A conversation about private information and the sharing thereof needs to happen, I think. In any event we spent over an hour cleaning frantically and in the end the prospective renter never even showed up. Two and a half weeks, twelve business days…
Here are your links and tell me what you’re up to this weekend in the comments! We’re going to start the first phase of deep cleaning and packing up for our move and I am going to get my work done! All I’ve managed are phone calls and a few pdfs and this changes now – Saturday at sunrise we attack!
As we get closer to it’s release, I’m not sure that the latest incarnation of The Great Gatsby will actually be good (and this from a woman who adores Carey Mulligan). But I am sure that the sets are going to blow me away, and I’m already drooling over the costumes from the previews. What say the minions – eager to see it or not so much?
Language is much trickier than most people think. I took a psychology class in high school where the teacher explained how it’s possible to fake out your brain by simply putting syllables together that sound correct but are actually meaningless. Here’s the fabulous John Cleese to demonstrate. Bonus fun! Turn on the closed captions and watch it try, poor thing, to do its job.
Photos from lavish New York private homes during the first half of the last century.
I have many questions about North Korea and what goes on there…but I admit, in the Trivial Category, why soldiers are wearing these tops the list. I thought this was only a thing in comic books and films where the director has no desire to portray reality. (Sidenote, heeled boots happened in The Avengers, and not just for Black Widow, and I was disappointed in Whedon.)
As a Gemini, I call BS. Although I find it funny because J. is a Scorpio, because of the two of us he’s the one with the best chance at a decently lucrative career. You can tell exactly how much stock I put in this sort of thing, but I can never resist checking my horoscope in magazines just for kicks.
Hat tip to Savvy, this tumblr is hysterical.
I’m suspicious of any hotel that doesn’t show pics of the bed and bathrooms. Doubly so here.
This is a really clever campaign. Oh, you don’t get it? Quick, to Netflix!
Cats have taken over everything, we must accept it.
The semi-occasional sheep, demonstrating how I generally feel about life and being overwhelmed at this moment.
“An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”
– Newton’s First Law of Motion
Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20. I’m not a person who really lives with regrets, I find them unhelpful (unless real and valid guilt is motivating you to change past behaviors) and unnecessarily time consuming. But I do enjoy pondering on What Ifs, and I often wonder what I might have done differently if I knew what I know now. For example:
If I’d known I’d be at this job for nearly five years, I would have looked harder for one that had better career potential, or at least that I enjoyed more (although in my defense, I did look and good jobs were scarce on the ground for most of those five years).
On that note, if I had known how many false starts to move elsewhere would have proved fruitless I would have been more proactive about finding a new job anyway, instead of putting up with it for “six more months.”
Along the same lines, I might have looked for a new and better flat. Our former managers seem to walked off with all of the tenets deposit money, which has meant we have to pay this month’s rent again to our new managers and other assorted troubles. I would say I’m surprised, except that they were terrible managers. Though good at kicking up a fuss, I don’t always enjoy doing so and thus I put up with leaky faucets, patchy heating units, bad wiring, and other problems (some of which took a literal year to resolve, and most of which still haven’t been addressed) long past the time I should have demanded more.
I would have been more proactive in pursuing my own career goals instead of allowing myself to get bogged down worrying about J.’s.
I’d have devoted energy elsewhere in some work assignments. For example, if I had known how little the administration was going to do in replacing me, in spite of 4 months’ notice and a lot of extra effort on my part to prepare, I wouldn’t have argued so much for more time. I would have simply taken the time they allowed me with my trainee and focused on completing some projects to include on a resume, and improved what I could before I left. It would have saved several months of stress and sleepless nights.
I would have tried to see setbacks as opportunities to do something new instead of falling back into safer Plan B’s.
I’d have made a stronger effort to let the opinions of others affect me less. I admit freely that I want to be well thought of, but I might have been more concerned with cultivating specific peoples’ good opinion instead of everybody’s.
I would have been more forceful about my worth. As my duties crept up, and then as I took on two other people’s responsibilities after they quit or retired, I largely allowed it to happen without commentary as to whether my pay should have increased as well. And when I attempted addressing what I was making vs. how significantly my job description had changed, I allowed myself to be shut down too easily. Lesson seriously learned.
I would have taken more classes. I had some idea of doing a masters program while working, but the administration shot it down (even though they allowed a coworker to do so, grumble). But I did take a couple of online and in class courses, one of which resulted in a publication in a literary magazine. Should have done more, who knows what else I’d have under my belt now.
Basically, looking back and summing up, for the past few years I’ve lived entirely too much in the future and not nearly enough in the now. I fell into the habit of looking forward to change instead of enacting it in the present. At some points I chose safety over risk, and still feel I was right in doing so, but there are some places where I definitely could have tried for a bit more danger. It’s funny how something can become your normal without your realizing it!
But I’m going to do better about being an active force instead of an acted upon object. I’m out of practice, but I have high hopes for myself.
Looking over the last five years, regrets not included, how would you have done things differently knowing what you know now?
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
― Leonard Bernstein
Three weeks from today will be my first day in nearly five years that I don’t have a full time job. Getting there is equal parts exhausting and frustrating, but strangely not in the least terrifying. I thought I would feel more panic or at least fright about the future, but there’s none of that.
The legal team at J.’s future employment has started the ball rolling for our visas.
We have short term housing worked out.
J. has a current job.
I’m getting braver by the day about diving back into freelancing.
All good things! No, the trouble is not the future, it’s (as it often is) the present. Getting from here to there. The proverbial now.
My trainee is still struggling mightily and there is so much out of my control when it comes to her training. I can’t force people to hold certifications to suit her time frame, I can’t even always get her to commit to the training time I want. I had to arm wrestle with administration to get what I have now, and the whole experience has been an lesson in a lot of energy expended for very little thanks. I may have to post about that next.
Training itself is challenging, and not just because my trainee has very poor retention! She constantly makes little mistakes and errors – from typos to major data storage snafus – that she does not catch herself. I fear even running to the vending machines now because I’ve come back to find her giving a patron majorly incorrect information, and once stopped her from disseminating highly confidential paperwork. She requires constant supervision. Lest you think I’m being too hard on her, these are things she should already have experience with as a dispatcher, it’s not new aspects to her job at all. I can see why they are trying to find her a new position, but I’m surprised they think giving her mine is a way to minimize damage.
It is the end of my semester and my supervisor is truly swamped with trying to get her assignments completed, and so she is not as available for me to address concerns with her. It’s not her fault, but the business culture of my office is (unfortunately) rather dog eat dog and I honestly worry about being blamed for my trainee’s lack of knowledge once I’m gone and no longer able to respond to such criticism. That sort of thing has happened to others in the past and I’m anxious to avoid being another casualty of it.
My new 6:30am drop off time is seriously hurting. I’m in a perpetual state of nearly-but-not-quite sick and due to the way schedules fall out we often don’t get home until after 6 or 7pm at night. At which time we need to cook, clean, and run any number of other errands. Last night I didn’t get dinner on the stove until nearly 9pm – the hour I wanted to be in bed. Speaking of dinner, a diet of pizza and cereal because we have not been able to make it to a grocery store during normal business hours isn’t helping. Dinner was a heavy duty vegetable minestrone to combat fears of scurvy!
Three weeks from today is going to be a good morning! The next 20 days are going to be stressful in the extreme. Perk me up, kittens, bring me your offerings of humorous tidbits, words of wisdom, or even commiseration as I do battle with elusive retailers for the MP and rewrite another section of my manual for my trainee!
“Monday is a lame way to spend 1/7 of your life.”
– Author Unknown
Weekend was a blur of family photos, a bit of local activism, and many dinners. For the first time in memory, Sunday dinner at my godparents spread out over three tables (plus one for the kids)! All wonderful but not exactly relaxing. Hence when I stumbled through the office doors this morning at that hated time 6:30am, I didn’t even try to force wakefullness; I just set another alarm and fell haphazardly onto the loan sofa in the department. I awoke an hour later covered in some sort of sofa-fuzz that needed a lint roller to resolve, but refreshed and ready to start the day.
Until our housing management company called and said our previous managers did not properly transfer our deposit so they have no record of our prepayment of this month’s rent. Currently, we’re tracking down four year old bank account information to prove ourselves and liking our former managers less and less by the minute (although to be fair we like the new ones quite a bit. We just wish they’d been our managers to start with as I imagine if they had been we would not currently be having these issues). I spent lunch wheedling information out of some people who did not want to give it to me and chasing information up phone trees like a metaphoric cat. And my trainee forgot every single thing I taught her on Thursday – plus she’s taking two days off next week which is two days of training she won’t get and desperately needs, since I only have 16 days left.
Mondays. I do not recommend them. Pizza for (a late) dinner, I think. Onward.
“Fridays are the hardest in some ways: you’re so close to freedom.”
― Lauren Oliver
Today is family photo day – and the weather is threatening rain. The photographer (an insanely talented woman who was once a roommate of my sister-in-law’s) has been the family’s go to photographer for well over a decade now and she really is phenomenal. But she’s also almost unnaturally optimistic about weather conditions…we’ll see if her predictions beat the weatherman’s.
In honor of the day, I trotted myself to my stylist over lunch yesterday and had her chop off nearly six inches of hair and I feel free. A couple times a year I’m suddenly seized by the desire to rid myself of all the previous six month’s work of my follicles and I’ve yet to regret it. This weekend I’ve got a dinner at my in law’s, a dinner at my godparents’, an event in the city, and I’m going to send out my first pitch in over two years. Once more into the breach! Let me know what you’re up to in the comments and here are your links:
My people! I’ve gobbled up Nancy Pearl’s books in particular and have found many favorite books and authors through her.
So, this vegan “leather” jacket is singing a siren song to me. Curse you, shopping ban!
Ah, I have wondered about manners in the digital age. A recent post by the estimable Caitlin Kelly led me down a quick personal meditation on simple manners and going out of your way for people – and the link is well worth a read. I’ve noticed a few trends in the past few years at the PD, but I’m wondering if the minion coterie has opinions (and you always have opinions, don’t you, darlings?) on how people think about interacting with others, particularly as we have more and more ways of doing so with less and less formalized rules.
Vice investigates cat conspiracy theories. I would shake my head, but PD work has convinced me that there are some people out there who are convinced the world is out to get them and concrete is evidence of the government’s involvement.
Infomercials, and more importantly the seemingly incompetent people who star in them, amuse me.
Unsure how you rank in the British class system? The BBC is here to help.
This illustrator decided to take Disney princesses and make their costumes slightly more period accurate. The Maid Marian is hands down my favorite for unexpectedness, and it was also her April Fool’s joke this year.
So. Dr. Suess had this thing for hats…
Holy. Hell. This is frightening, and the next person who tells me rape culture doesn’t exist is getting this link. When children understand what it is and how to use it as a weapon, it’s time to admit our society has a problem.
The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.
– Muhammad Ali
Yesterday started out a sad day at the gym, kittens. As a staff member I have access to extracurricular exercise classes for an incredibly low price – one upfront fee gets me into any number of zumba, yoga, weight and interval training, and aerobics classes I choose to take over a semester. It’s pretty great. Alas yesterday was the last class of the term and at the end of April (as is well documented) I’ll be gone from the university.
So after class I took a moment to thank the zumba teacher, who was by far my favorite instructor over the last year and a half. I hate working out, but her classes were the first thing I’ve tried for exercise that I actively enjoyed and under her I’ve lost 15 pounds, gained a bunch of muscle and have a slight cut started in my arm. (In a fabulous Michelle Obama way, not a creepy steroid one, but I digress…) I just wanted to tell her how much I appreciated her classes and how much I would miss them. She asked why I could no longer attend and I explained why I would no longer be staff. Her response: “Girl, you can totally come to my class for free over the summer if you’re still in town. You’ve been working really hard and it’s always great to see you in class so let’s keep you active and healthy!”
Remember to say thank you, kittens. Not with the expectation of getting anything, mind, but people don’t take gratitude for granted and it’s surprising how far people will go for each other after hearing those two little words. Her generosity and kindness really blew me away. And I find the only obligation one has after being the recipient of such an act (besides a sincere handwritten thank you note, possibly supplemented with baked goods) is to pay it forward to someone else when one has the chance. No downside to that.
“Huh, I’ve wiped the file? I’ve wiped all the files? I’ve wiped the internet? Aw, hell I don’t even have a modem!”
– Eddie Izzard
Hola, minions.
Yes things are looking a bit different here at Small Dog Blog Headquarters. I wish I could say in was in connection with something significant or noteworthy, but the truth is that I took a blog and website customizing class last week and I’m just goofing around learning new tricks. You know how I adore tinkering with things. I’m toying with the idea of a professional website here in the new future; the valiant Val, husband to Venice, was kind enough to walk me through the website process a week back, and I’ve been scheming about it ever since. And what better way to practice than hazarding the blog with near oblivion as I press buttons and fiddle around. Who knows, the blog may change again here in the near future! Likewise I might delete the internet, anything is possible.
Small Dog Syndrome 