Snow in Kyoto

Carrot and Stick

Or how I'll be spending my money:

• Continuing Education Credits
• Yarn for Tubey
• Clean house top to bottom
• Join Nutrisystem
• Get car fixed
• Buy realtime software thingy
• Get car registered
• Treadmill
• Pay off final credit card
• Spinning Wheel
• New equipment
• Entire two-crust cherry pie from Slice of Pie
• Consult doctor
• t/b/a
• Private
• t/b/a

Hooray for bureaucracy!

So here's me been thinking all this while that my continuing education credits had been due in June, and were thus six months late.  I thought there was a good possibility, if I got them in before the end of the year, that they would accept them.  I thought there was an equally good possibility that they would not, and that I would be out a job.

I was determined to try to turn that into a positive by:

1. Robbing a bank -- morally, I'm pretty okay with that, but it would be an awful lot of work.  These modern-day banks require a great deal of research and thought and planning to successfully rob.  Also, possibly accomplices, and I'm no social butterfly.  So I put that one on the back burner.
2. Finding a new job.  Maybe in the exciting field of food service.  (We English majors have so many options!)  But these food service jobs generally also involve this thing called "cleaning."  And I'm sorry to have to tell you that the one time I have ever been fired was from a food service job, in high school, because my cleaning was criminally negligent.  Oh, nobody got sick, the health inspector didn't catch us out, and no mice staged a coup from a base of operations under the deep freeze, but they definitely implied that this might be a possibility.  (The management, I mean, not the mice.)
3. Moving to a state with less stringent laws for court reporters, possibly New Mexico.  Great plan!  Great fucking plan!  Now all I have to do is win the lottery so I have money for the move.  Hmm, must notify the lottery officials of my intentions.  Because that's the only way this train's gonna get rollin'.  Of course, if I win the lottery, my plans have always been to quit working.  Also, to tell off every person who has ever annoyed me within our organization.

Yeah, so I've been a little down lately.  I needed 12 credits, and each credit costs about 60 bucks.  So that's over $700 I needed to come up with.  Around Christmas time.  And then my car started making yet another noise.  And maybe they wouldn't accept the late credits after all, and I'd have spent $700, and my car would still be making the noise, and they'd probably repossess it anyway, and I would have to go live in a cave, and maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.

But yesterday, I dug out the very official-type letter they'd sent me back in October, and read it, and still couldn't make heads nor tails of what they were trying to tell me.  So I screwed up my courage, and called the lady who rules us all with her iron fist and asked her what the fuck.  She says that I have 8 credits due, but not until June.  I'm pretty sure this is a mistake, but I won't be going out of my way to clear it up!

And my good news didn't end there!  Last night there was a public hearing on that I wasn't looking forward to one jot.  You see, public hearings involve The Public.  And when The Public attend public hearings involving things going on in their back yards, they turn into Eastern European peasants with torches and pitchforks, grim, gray, humorless, and with unintelligible accents I'm supposed to decipher.  And no one but no one has any idea of how to behave.  They talk over each other.  They shout comments from the audience.  They wander away from the microphone.  They get in fist fights.  And that's just the commissioners!  Oh, it's a mess, I tell you.  But they always request me.  And they do pay frightfully well.  So I go.

But yesterday, I noticed that I hadn't been assigned the job.  I assumed they'd just forgotten to call and schedule it.  So I called my office and asked what was going on.  And they said that someone else had asked for that particular job, because she had an intern she was training.  Apparently, she wanted to scare her off or something.

Well, naturally, I was thrilled, because this hearing was going to be a lulu!  And now I didn't have to go!  But also, my hackles were up, because this wench was encroaching on my territory.  That's my arsing client!  And you don't just come along and take someone's client out from under them!  You just don't!  You don't move into someone's house and start eating their food, and you don't steal their clients.  That's just rude!  Also, this woman makes mistakes.  And then at the next hearing, when the chairman asks if there are any corrections to the previous minutes, I just have to sit there and take it, with everyone thinking I made the mistakes.  Argh!

But, as I sat in my cozy living room, with my dog at my feet and my knitting in my lap at 11:00 last night, and thought to myself "I wonder if that hearing's over?  Probably not," I was pretty well mollified.  After all, you reap what you sew, bitch!

It's going to be one of those days

I was awakened this morning by a company claiming to be "Arbitron Ratings," that apparently has something to do with local radio stations and ratings.  I can't confirm this, because I've never answered the phone when they call.  But it seems they're desperate to find out what the pre-spinster demographic thinks of local radio, because they call at least once a day, sometimes more.  This is the first time they've called at the fightin' hour of 8:30 a.m., though.  This means war!  They claimed this is the last time they're going to call -- my last chance to participate in radio history.  They'd better hope that it is, because if they call again, they're getting an earful of that Genuine Replica of the Whistles Used on the Titanic my dad got me several Christmases ago.

And let me tell you, that sucker is loud like grandpa's plaid pajamas!  If only someone had thought to use them to call for help after they had struck the iceberg, I'm sure rescue would have converged on them from as far away as Australia!

So Arbitron be ware.  Quit stalking me or you'll get such a blast to the eardrum you'll never hear the sweet strains of your beloved radio in your phone ear again.  And you'll flinch every time your good ear catches "My Heart Will Go On."

But probably you already do that.

Ramblings

Lately, I've had this inexplicable urge to move to New York City.  Why, I don't know, because I would never leave my apartment. 

You see, in my mind, New York City is made up almost entirely of muggers, rapists and murderers, with a few innocent souls scurrying from building to building like frightened mice.  I have watched Sex and the City, and know this cannot be entirely true.  Those good ladies almost never get mugged, raped or murdered. 

But then there is the other problem.  Assuming I did survive my jaunt through the mean streets, I would never find my way back.  I have no sense of direction at the best of times, and I find fear to be highly disorienting.  I would be found, days later, wandering around some landfill in New Jersey, with an upside down transit map and a brand-spanking-new facial tic.

On an entirely different note, I dreamt last night that my iPod also held magic spells.  (Think Dungeons & Dragons, not white bunnies and top hats.)  Hey, why not?  It does everything else!  Trouble was, while scrolling through for your favorite artist, album and song is generally not a life or death situation, I was trying to ~cough~ protect the sauerbraten.  And generally, by the time I found the spell I needed, the hairy, beef-loving menaces had moved on.  Clearly, your good spell storage device needs to be more point-and-click. 

But I digress.  I've done some fancy-schmancy dream interpretating, and realized that my subconscious was trying to tell me that I need to buy a shiny new, 60-gig black iPod with video capabilities (spell-casting attachment optional).  And talk someone who can cook into making sauerbraten.

Also, I need to quit drinking wine before bed.  They were out of my lovely chocolate oranges, owing to the impending holiday doom.  But you know?  Those little jokes they print on the Dove Promises wrappers just get funnier with every glass!

Morbid much?

In some ways, I think it would be fun to be a ghost, if you were the right kind of ghost.  But then I think it might be like the last leg of a long car trip, when you long to be home with all your soul, but you've still got a couple hundred miles to cover, and nothing on earth will get you there any faster than traffic and the speed limit allows.

Whimper

At this point, my plan for getting anything at all in by deadline this week includes a great deal of caffeine, very little sleep, and a miracle occurring.

Listen, you attorneys, and listen well.  It is not always possible to take a person's deposition.  If that person is very old, decrepit of mind and body, somewhat deaf and speaks in a whisper, you may be able to catch the gist of what they are saying, but the court reporter is trying to catch every word.  And we are not super heroes.

This man would say something I would not understand.  I would ask him to repeat it.  He would not understand me.  He would glare at me.  I would look helplessly at the attorney.  She would ask him to repeat it.  He would not remember either the question or his answer.  The attorney would move on, leaving me in no way clearer as to what was said.

Eventually, I tried cutting to the helpless look at the attorney, without trying to intervene directly.  Until I realized that I wasn't making any sort of record of the fact that I didn't understand and ask for clarification.

And meanwhile, we're in a nursing home, and there's a lady across the hall constantly moaning and wailing as though she's practicing to be a ghost.

And, of course, it was a video, so I can't even fudge things a little.  Not that we ever do that.

Rant

So I'm chatting on the phone with my mom when she says she thinks there's an eagle flying over them. 

We don't get eagles very often in these parts, so I ran outside to see what I could see.  It's barely 20 degrees, I'm still in my pajamas, without so much as a flapping pair of carpet slippers on my feet -- but I grabbed my camera!

Truly, I am a child of the age of technology.

Well, my feet are half frostbitten and torn up by gravel from the driveway besides, and this is the best picture I could get:

Fricken eagles move so fast, and the effing camera is so slow.  Could someone please create a true point and click digital camera?  You know, one that doesn't take 30 seconds to take a picture?  Please?  It didn't even take a good picture!  The reason the eagle is so blurry is because it was making sure the tree branches in the foreground were in perfect focus.  Now, if it just took the picture when I wanted it to, without all the messing, I would have had a pretty good picture of the true subject of the photo.  Grr.

But speaking of the age of technology.  We had the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age.  Have we been going through the steel age?  And does the technology age follow logically?  It is the medium upon which we are building our society.  Probably people of a more philosophical bent than I have answered that question.  Maybe I'll do research. 

Or not.

Lush

I accidentally agreed to go to a Christmas party tonight.  (Christmas carols were sung until I agreed.  Very unfair.)  I'm just waiting for my ride now.

The trouble is, in an effort to get my jolly on, this was my dinner tonight.

Unfortunately, alcohol does not make me jolly.  It makes me warm and sleepy-happy and content.

Now all I want to do is climb into bed with the rest of my wine and chocolate and a good book.

Would it be wrong to seduce my friend just so I could stay home in bed?

He isn't married or anything.

Do not speak to me of hot chocolate

Hot chocolate is for a day of frolicking about in the snow building snowmen and  having snow fights.

We road warrior types need something more substantial when we come in from the cold.

Nothing like a hot and spicy bloody mary (or two) to get the blood pumping again!

Me? Neurotic?

When my best friend and I were teenagers, we both had this thing about Never Ever Letting the Mailman See Us. Seriously. Never!!! The World As We Know It would End!!! I would hide in the woods, face down, like some sort of guerilla commando. She lived in a trailer court, so she would lurk behind other people’s trailers, or hide behind the propane tank until he was gone.

Clearly, we only worried about what the mailman thought.  The rest of the world could draw its own conclusions.

This was made even worse because we were total mail junkies. We belonged to fan clubs and got mailings. We had more pen pals than we knew what to do with. We ordered everything by mailorder because we lived in the sticks and this was before on-line shopping was a viable option.

We loved mail.

But we feared the mailman.

Did our respective mailmen feel like they were being watched, I wonder? Did they feel paranoid? Did they dread our mailboxes?

The funny thing was, I actually really loved our mailman. He was a wonderful, kind man who always had time to stop and chat. And he smoked a pipe, and left a trail of good-smelling smoke behind him. He was married to my second grade teacher.

But he Must. Never. See. Me.

Ever.

The point?

Well, I still haven’t gotten over that. I live way closer to the road than I used to in the old days. And if the new mail lady looks up, and my curtains aren’t closed, she can see me. She waves. She actually acknowledges my presence, and that I was, like, looking out the window, like, waiting for her.

I’ve been known to actually throw myself on the floor as though she were carrying an AK-47 assault rifle instead of a pile of bills and catalogs, rather than let her see me.

So, when people ask why I buy a big box of Godiva chocolates for the poor lady ever year for Christmas?  That is why. 

But what am I going to do this year when I’m not celebrating Christmas? She has enough of my neuroses to deal with without that. I think I just won’t offer her an explanation. I’ll just leave her the chocolates some time around New Year with a nice note thanking her for being such a nice, patient mail lady and not even mention the C word.

Sounds good.

Thanks for your help!