The grind explained

For anyone who's wondering, the small (15 employees) company I work for publishes and distributes newsletters for homeowners' associations, small cities, neighborhoods, etc. I design ads, lay out newsletters, update the website (sort of), offer pranking suggestions, and keep the profanity to a minimum in my general vicinity. I got this job by Google-mapping "publishing" and showing up completely unsolicited with my resume, which is pretty nerve-racking; you should try it. (I did this at several places, and you would think it would get easier each time. Nope: each time I sat in the car thinking, "What am I doing!?") The job they happened to have open in September wasn't for me, but they surprised me by following up in February with an offer I couldn't refuse. So I quit my previous job after being there only three months and I haven't looked back. It was Divine intervention with a capital D.

PS - Scotty, do you note the green garb in the first picture below? That's right--I'm still sporting my Green Gladiators shirt. Green team for life!

The grind part II

My new* job is about as good as 40 hours a week can possibly be.

• I’ve managed to be pretty dang organized. (It helps when you get to start from scratch, and you don’t inherit someone else’s disorganization.)
• Multitasking rocks.
• We can have a heated work discussion involving raised voices and cussing** and then we’re all still friends two minutes later.
• I found out that you can listen to too much NPR.
• Try Pandora.com and love it.
• I went to Italy for a month and still had a job when I got back.
• It takes 10 minutes to drive to work, including dropping Mark off.
• All-expenses paid trip for a conference in L.A. ...what?!
• I can wear jeans.
• Or shorts.
• And T-shirts.
• Chacos every. single. day.
• I pretty much come and go when I please as long as I total 40 hours a week.
• Did I mention I went to Italy for a month? Is that crazy or what!?
• Office politics? The politics around here involve who can talk loudest in the staff meeting.
• Projects, projects, projects. I do projects all day long.
• Can you say Adobe CS3? I’m in love.
• I have zero formal training in what I do, but it’s what I love to do, and I get paid to do it, and every day I learn something new. It's a beautiful cycle.
• Humans are not meant for little windowless offices with buzzing fluorescent lights, but when I’ve got my own music, the ability to shut the door, and no one cares that I never turn on the light anyway, I’ll take it.
• They decided to add fish to my fishbowl:

• Office pranks abound (like the toilet papering, stuffing a couch into the little office, messing with shortcuts on the computer, and an asbestos warning waiting for me when I got back from vacation):

I’m pretty happy here.

*new being newER. Um, 5 months new.
**Though tempting, I never cuss.

Dear...Someone Connected with This Address

This was waiting for us in our stack of mail when we got back from Italy. I enjoyed it so much that I really wanted to keep it, but I'll document it here instead.

It came in this envelope:
(front)
(back)


Here's the meat of it:
[click to enlarge]

Here's the "rug" in question (really a 10x16 piece of paper):


I was supposed to send it back (the next morning) in this:




Also included were some product offers:

...and testimonials:

I think that anything that helps someone to sincerely draw nearer to the Lord is a good thing on some level. But questionable grammar, alarming punctuation, and creative underlining deserve a good ribbing.

Long Sunday Walks

I told Mark I was getting a ride home from church so he could keep the car for his presidency meeting. But he forgot about that and got a ride instead. And he was home for almost 10 minutes before he realized it. "Um, guess where the car is right now..."

Long pause. Cue laughter.

"You're a moron."


By the way, it takes about 40 minutes to walk from our apartment to the church at a moderate pace, which is a lot longer than I had anticipated. But it was a lovely walk!

Read this book

Some things are SO FUNNY that you absolutely must share them with people. And even though you have no idea what else is going on in Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse, you can appreciate the humor in this paragraph on page 57:

'We come to the conclusion,' [said Ickenham], 'that the whole situation pivots on the pig. Eliminate the pig, and we see daylight. "What, no pig?" says the Duke, and after a little natural disappointment turns his thoughts to other things -- I don't know what, but whatever things Dukes do turn their thoughts to. There must be dozens. This leaves us with the simple problem -- How is the existing state of what I might call "plus pig" to be converted into a state of "minus pig"? There can only be one answer, my dear Emsworth. The pig must be smuggled away to a place of safety and kept under cover till the Duke has blown over.'

Thanks again, Salvation Army.

The tri-wing screw

So with a little help from Wikipedia I figured out the screw that was giving us trouble on the iron yesterday:

"Tri-Wing, as the name suggests, is a screw with three "wings" and a small triangular hole in the center. A variation is a kind in which the three "wings" are joined in the center (with no triangular hole). A somewhat similar-looking design in which three short radial slots are not joined in the center is called a Tri-groove screw head.

Tamper-resistant
"The Tri-Wing is a tamper-resistant screw due to the difficulty in finding Tri-Wing screwdrivers in hardware stores, although they can be legally bought online. As is often the theory with tamper-resistant hardware, there is no expectation that it will be impossible for a tamperer to obtain the driver. Rather, the main idea is simply that most tamperers will not bother to seek out and obtain a driver. In the case of end-users, this reduces the incidence of do-it-yourself repair or modifications (and any resulting injury or product damage). In the cases of vandalism prevention and theft prevention, since most vandalism and theft incidents are simply crimes of easy opportunity, the idea is to "raise the bar" and make the opportunity less easy."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-Wing; my italics)

Take that, tri wing tamperproof do-it-yourselfer protection! I'll pry my iron open if I want it open! And now I want one of those drivers, just so I can tamper when I want to tamper.

A few firsts

It's been an eventful past few days:

Tuesday & Wednesday: First ever "business" trip. Xerox sent my supervisor and me to L.A., all expenses paid, to be wined and dined into either buying a large digital printer or partnering with them to help grow the business. It was awesome. Now, let's be clear: I did not deserve to be there, but I sure tried to pretend like I did.

Tuesday: First ever trip to In-N-Out. I bought only fries since it was 6:00, supposedly only an hour before dinner (I regretted not getting a burger when we didn't actually sit down to eat until almost 8:30 and I hadn't had lunch). I must say I wasn't wowed by In-N-Out.

Tuesday: First ever conversation entirely in Italian. Well, at least the couple I met in the Hilton lobby spoke (only) Italian, and I communicated well enough through some sort of Spanitaluguese. They generously bought me a hot chocolate while they got espressos (um, I had no idea that espressos were the size of shot glasses...? Like 2 ounces of beverage for $3? ...stay tuned for more evidence of my Bubble upbringing.) We conversed for TWO HOURS! Turns out they're from Milan, and I gave her my parents' phone number and she gave me her business card...maybe Mark and I will drop in to say hello while we're there next month.

Wednesday: First ever conversation about religion on an airplane. Also, first ever Book of Mormon giveaway.

Saturday: First ever successful take-it-apart-and-put-it-back-together electronic fix-it project. I needed the iron to hem some curtains, but to my dismay it didn't heat up when I plugged it in. (This probably had something to do with it falling a number of times from a rather unwise perch in our closet.) So we pried it apart---I say 'pried' because it had the weirdest screw that I couldn't get a grip on with any of our screwdrivers or bits...it had only three grooves coming out from a center point; anyone have any insight on such a screw?---so anyway, I pried it apart and found the guilty broken piece that was disrupting the circuit. To make a long story short, we reconnected the broken piece with some twist-tie wire and then refastened the iron to the plastic handle using hanging wire (turns out that prying it open busted many plastic pieces necessary for holding the iron together). Yeah, we're pretty much MacGuyvers now. We kept a full pitcher of water on hand for the test-run of the newly repaired iron lest it spontaneously burst into flame. Fortunately, it seems to work just fine. I was tickled with our success!

Saturday: First ever civil wedding. It was surprisingly a lot like the movies, except that instead of a string quartet they had a rock band ("Here Comes the Bride" never sounded so angsty). There was a gazebo, a wooded clearing, a gregarious preacher, scantily-clad bridesmaids, scantily-clad female guests, a buffet, a cake, nothing to drink but tea, a horse-drawn carriage, a champaigne toast, and an open bar (which means, I learned, that the all the alcohol is FREE!). Talk about one expensive party! This was also my first ever party where things progressively got less fun as everyone else got more drinks. First ever time watching someone I know and mostly respect go back for beer after beer after beer. First ever time being one of the few totally sober people around. Last time ever going to a wedding or party without my own car.

[Note: It was not drunken revelry, at least not when my ride and I finally left at 10:30. I wasn't ever really uncomfortable, either. I just thought, "Wow, I have yet to see that guy without a full beer in his hand" and "You guys are going clubbing after this? Who's driving?" and "Um, I really don't think what everyone is laughing at is that funny." Aside from feeling over-dressed and under-drunk I had a lovely time.]

My real-life education continues. What a week!

Today I bought 19 pretty much brand-new books and 4 used books--for a total of 25 books--for EIGHT (8) DOLLARS ($).

The used books are:
Twelfth Night
As You Like It
Uncle Fred in the Springtime
and 25,000+ Baby Names. (Speculate all you like; this is no harbinger. I'm giving it away.)

The practically new books (all Dover thrifts) are:
The Tempest
King Lear
Hamlet
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Merchant of Venice
Othello
Much Ado About Nothing
Great Expectations
Pride & Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
The Raven and Other Favorite Poems
Self-Reliance and Other Essays (can I get a "woot woot" from Pinto)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Importance of Being Earnest
Leaves of Grass
The Scarlet Letter
100 Best-Loved Poems
and Frankenstein.

I'm not going to pretend that I read Shakespeare for leisure, but they were so cheap that I couldn't pass them up.

My gratitude for this bargain goes to the downtown Salvation Army store, the manager of the Salvation Army store who suggested I browse through his three boxes of recent arrivals in the "employee-only" section, the other Salvation Army employee who finally gave up trying to kick me out of said "employee-only" section, and, lastly, the other Salvation Army employee who rung me up, who quickly became overwhelmed at the prospect of calculating the posted "80% off the cover price" of each of these books and instead charged a flat rate of a few quarters or so each based on a book's size (that's how they used to do it; and don't tell Gary). I was so thrilled that I took the wrong freeway junction on the way home.

In other news, I'm in the market for another bookshelf.

Quote of the month

Mark: These magnifying mirrors make my head look huge!

Me: Um, that's not a magnifying mirror.

Men Making the Most of 'Twilight'

To all those who joined me in reading that shameless teenage romance, enjoy this for a belly laugh:

http://mormonhusbands.blogspot.com/2008/02/twilight-series-for-dummies-and-totally.html

(For the record: I am not and was not ever in love with Edward. In fact, the relationships in this book disturb me.)

A simile is like a metaphor

Supposedly these rhetorical gems were gleaned from actual high school essays.

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p. m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
26. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

27. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Gluttony = nirvana

Isn't ironic that you fast all day and then gorge yourself on dinner, after which you can barely move for at least an hour? (Maybe you don't do that. Maybe it's just me.)

Anyway, I was feeling pretty ambitious this afternoon and I went all out for dinner. Pot roast (first ever), dinner rolls from scratch (first ever, and despite my fears, they turned out perfect--I even put them in one of those bread baskets with a little cloth), salad with to-die-for homemade croutons (I'll never go back to store-bought; ask me for the recipe, it's easy), and, AND, I - made - a - dessert. From scratch. Which is completely unprecedented. In my entire life.

Hello, domesticity, I have arrived.

The grind

Observations from the last two months of work:

• Unfortunately, I'm learning that I'm not quite as organized as I thought I was.
• Being the middleman enforcer is rough. (And the mean-fun of it wears off quick.) I'd much rather be the one to exercise mercy than enforce justice. However, I recently discovered that it's much more tolerable to enforce justice if you can muster up some compassion.
• Except when people are mean. Then I don't mind the justice part.
• A brisk 15-minute bicycle commute is a great way to start the day, even when the wind chill puts it in the 30s somewhere. That's how you know you're alive (or were).
• Seriously though, you simply cannot beat living that close to work, especially in this town.
• The fact that I am biking to work in January with only a windbreaker and some earwarmers for warmth is awesome.
• It's been painfully apparent lately that important places are mostly only open 8 to 5. This makes it a challenge to get to those places when you have to be in another one of those places all day. And your time off doesn't kick in for 6 months. And you rode your bike to work.
• Humans are not meant for cubicles. Each day my soul cries out in affirmation that I do not belong in a cubicle.
• I'm a project person. I feel most productive when I'm working toward a finishable goal and when I'm done I have something to show for it. Cyclical work doesn't hold much satisfaction.
• That said, I can't complain about coming home at 5 and completely forgetting about work until I show up the next day.
• Apparently changing the thermostat at a public institution requires the approval of the state legislature. (They must not be in session.)
• Having two people doing the exact same job with a lot of gray area and no clear leader can be a problem.
• I am clueless about office politics. It's like being transplanted from the American frontier into 19th-century British high society.
• In the interest of looking professional we'll have no casual Friday, but please feel free to show ample cleavage any day of the week.
• Working at a school is almost as good as being in school. Not really, but at least I'm in the building.
• I'm really excited to have kids.

yuck

So it turns out that cherry flavored Kool-Aid tastes like watered down cough syrup. A piece of toast and 8 ounces of orange juice hasn't purged the aftertaste. Sick sick sick.

Deproductivity

I would venture to guess that the average populace would say that the opposite of “productive” is “unproductive,” but I think that “unproductive” is just the absence of productivity—the complete opposite of “productive” should be negative productivity, or, shall we say, “deproductivity.”

See, if you’d spent almost 13 hours working on a freelance job and then, after 2 additional hours, when you went to save it, something went horribly wrong and there was an error when you tried to open it again, and then you spent another twenty minutes in a harried panic trying every possible thing you could think of to recover the file (praying the whole time), only to learn that it had been corrupted beyond recognition, and one brief Google search was all you needed to discover that your case was essentially hopeless, but then you realized that there was an older version (saved at about 10 hours in) on another jump drive (praise all that is good and right), you would do the simple math equation

15 (total hours worked) – 10 (hours of work for which you still have something to show) = 5 (hours of work lost)

to learn that in just a few brief seconds of you had an amazing 5 hours of deproductivity, and it would've been better if you'd just done something else last night, like stay home and take a relaxing bath.

As seen in Working Mother magazine: Oros the Organic Baby Mountain Goat. ($27.00)

I'm not kidding.

Breaking and entering?

Yesterday morning the Relief Society president called to tell me that Parry, the deaf woman who I visit teach, was in the hospital. I agreed to go visit her later that afternoon on my way to the high school to tutor.

Naturally, I whiled away at least an hour in frivolity, then left to visit Parry with just enough time for a ten to fifteen minute visit. After all, my communication abilities with the deaf are limited at best, and you can only ask how someone is doing and then nod as if you understand their answer so many times.

Parry was happy to see me and gave me some interaction between text messages to her daughter. I managed to understand that she felt better than she did the night before and that she wasn't sure when she was going home. At some point I became aware that she was worried about draining the battery on her cell phone and that she wanted me to go back to her apartment to collect it. I was worried about time and tried to politely decline, saying I had to work, and could she wait until this evening? But she was very persuasively adamant that she needed it right now, and she doesn't live too far away, and I just didn't know how to tactfully say no. (Literally.)

So off I go. As I'm walking out the door she stops me to add some important information---her apartment number. I'm glad she remembered to tell me that she had moved apartments since I last visited her...

Good thing it's a short drive to the apartment, because I'm in a hurry. As I go to put the key in the lock, I'm stopped by what sounds like the high-pitched frequency of a television on inside. Strange. Could her also-deaf husband be home? I "ring" the "doorbell"---a button connected to a solitary bulb on the floor of the living room. No response. I've got to get going. I open the door. The TV is on, no volume, closed-captions going. I peek my head around the door. No lights on, that I can see, and I can't hear anything. The place is kind of messy, and who's going to think to turn off the TV when you're headed to the hospital? It was probably left on by accident. Besides, what could I do? It's not like I can call out, "Hey, is anybody home?" I step gingerly inside the apartment. I think I hear something in the other room, but isn't that just the sound of a dog collar outside...or do they have a dog...? There's no time for this. I decide to make a break for the phone charger. I head for the outlet, only to find that there are approximately fourteen different small black cords plugged in and tangled all over the place. Wait --- definitely just heard a sound from the other room. Panic. No phone charger in sight---it's probably behind the couch---and there's a whole room between me and the front door. Decide to head back out the door and try again to enter the socially acceptable way. I hear more noise coming from the bedroom. A wrapping-up-an-activity-and-heading-for-the-living-room sort of noise. Footsteps. Too much distance between me and the front door. All I can think is, "Please have clothes on please have clothes on pleasehaveclotheson--"

And then we met---it took a minute for a (thankfully) fully-clothed Bruce to see me, but I was keenly aware of him, having been tipped off by my auditory advantage--and he made an eek sound, and I made an eek sound, and I frantically tried to gesticulate that I had a key, and your wife gave it to me, and she wanted her---her---this thing, this cell phone thing, the thing that plugs into the wall, and I'm sorry for showing up in your living room in the middle of the day, but she gave me a key, see, and---where's the cell phone charger?

I told Parry about it when I got back, and she thought it was hilarious. And I was a good 20 minutes late to tutoring.

For future reference

As I handed over my CURRENT, wrinkled, potato-peel-stained coupon, I learned that Bed Bath & Beyond accepts even their "expired" ones. How ironic.

Just in case

I'm a pack rat because you just never know.

Take today, for example: My mom wants me to send her some long-handled measuring spoons (apparently those are hard to come by in Italy, even though containers are tall). I told her I knew just the kind if she was willing to pay $10, and luckily for both of us, Bed Bath & Beyond was (sorta) on the way home. I found what I was looking for after scanning 10-foot walls of kitchen gadgets and was happily driving away when I saw a gentleman walking through the parking lot with his BB&B 20%-Off Coupon in hand. A coupon that looked hauntingly familiar.

Rewind to yesterday afternoon. I, like most of you, received yet another of that very same coupon for 20% off any single item at Bed Bath & Beyond. Usually I've dutifully filed these coupons away in my coupon folder --- just in case I happen to want another household gadget, just in case Bed Bath & Beyond happens to carry the cheapest version of said household gadget, just in case I consciously decide to make a non-food purchase requiring a trip to a store I never visit. You know --- just in case.

Yesterday was different. Yesterday I was a new woman. Yesterday I released myself from just-in-case-you-never-know-ness. Yesterday I thought, "I never go to Bed Bath & Beyond, and I'm going to throw this away." Unprecedented.

Well, you can guess the rest---after realizing I paid too much for something, I came home, checked to see if any of my old coupons hadn't expired (they all had), dug yesterday's coupon out of the garbage, cleaned off the potato peelings, and I'm headed back to BB&B to get my mom's two bucks back. It's a matter of principle. (And a personality quirk that should be the subject of another post.)

As for throwing away coupons (and other items that might possibly be useful in the future), this is exactly why I don't do it.