After a two year gap from office-buttmonkeying, I can honestly say I’m very glad to be back.
I may be incredibly flippant about the kind of work I do, but I must say that I couldn’t be more pleased to be elbows-deep in printer guts, rasslin’ Excel into making attractive charts, and marching boxes of superannuated files down to the archive room.
I spent hours yesterday jackassing around with Excel, trying to replicate a presentation for which the template had been long lost. I haven’t quite got it yet, but I feel that I’m getting closer. And when I finally get it to go, by gosh and by golly I’m saving a copy for future use! It’s kind of a pain in the butt, but also kind of interesting. I’m learning and making something all at once, and that’s what I like to do.
That and be efficient. I’m still working on that one; there hasn’t been a fulltime office buttmonkey in there for probably on five years, and so files are stowed away willy-nilly, things are saved at random, or not at all. There will be a dozen drafts of a document, but the final copy? Was there ever one? So in the midst of whipping that mess into order, I’m called upon to retrieve files, make copies, create new documents, and sometimes, being at the mercy of resources that are hard-to-locate or might not even exist, I end up taking way longer to accomplish things than I’m anything like comfortable with.
But, I’ll get there, and I think this is going to be a pretty decent situation for all concerned.
It’s been nearly a month since I looked at an Internet form with a header that read “Adde New Post.” Okay, there’s no Olde Englishe “E“, that’s just a typo I decided to leave in because I’m entirely too easily amused.
To quote Jim Anchower from The Onion, “I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I’ve barely had a chance to catch my breath these days.”
This past month has been mad, insane, crazy-go-nuts, but actually in a good way. I think I’m just gonna have to break it all down listy-style to make sure I don’t forget anything good.
1. Starting off in October, Joel and I went on vacation. We went to Lake Ouachita, and it was fantastic! We rode mountain bikes, read library books, and took pictures. Some evidence of that can be witnessed here.
The guy who owns the Hwy 27 Fishing Village has two cute dogs:
Rascal
and Ace.
The more funny-looking and disproportionate your dog is, the more likely I am going to find him/her completely, ridiculously adorable.
2. Most of the rest of October pretty much was business as usual…crappy call center job, Joel working weird hours, days getting shorter. Bleh.
3. Then, toward the end of October, a friend of a friend offered to forward my resume to an architect who needed an office manager. She forwarded, I was interviewed, he hired me, new job starts 11-8-2010.
4. But before that, we had planned a trip to visit my parents in Nebraska during the last weekend of the month. So we packed up to the Panhandle and visited my folks. Joel and Dad patched a hole in the kitchen ceiling, Mom and I dug up some volunteer asparagus which have been migrated to Kansas City and we all had a real nice time. Took the dog out to raise hell in the neighbor’s empty pasture again. She did. And how. She was in and out of the river about 17 times, rolled around on a dried cowpat, and generally acted like the wild animal she fondly believes herself to be. While we were up in NE, Joel, Dad, and I did some logistics figuring regarding getting the old VW toted back to KC., and I think this coming spring we’re going down there with a light bar and a ball hitch, and will be dragging the old car to KC, to a body shop. I’m pretty stoked about that.
5. This brings us up pretty close to now, which is my first weekend after a full week at my new job. I’m still getting the lay of the land there, so to speak. Trying to get to grips with my predecessors’ arcane filing “system” and come to an understanding with four antiquated and decrepit printers and a phone system straight out of 1980. I’ve been alternately feeling super efficient (“YEAH, I showed Excel who ain’t a chump”) and like a complete incompetent when I could not get the photocopier to do a two-sided copy. The printers love me, the photocopier hates me, and the e-mail system is still baffling me. But I think the office and I will come to an understanding, and sooner rather than later!
6. Oh, and in between visiting my parents and starting the new job, I managed to catch a particularly noisome, snot-ridden, hacking-fit cold. I’m still slightly under the weather but definitely on the mend. Last Saturday, I literally slept all day.
7. Oh, and somewhere in there, I made a great new jacket:
It’s Butterick B5232 “Option B” and it was super easy and came out exactly the way I had hoped it would. I made this of natural cotton canvas, lined with some acetate brocade that I have a crapload of. I wish I’d had more canvas to make a matching pair of bloomers and an overskirt. This jacket works well with modern clothes, too. I wore it to work the other day with a pair of corduroys and a v-neck knit top and it looked pretty sharp.
8. So, after my first day at the new job, Joel got a job offer at a shop much closer to home, guaranteed full-time, insurance, and a fixed, reliable working schedule. As much fun as the Trek store people have been to work with, the balance of a predictable schedule and a 2.5 mile commute won out.
9. He also bought a motor scooter, a Honda Ruckus (his is red). This is for trips that are too long to be conveniently bike-able, but not worth firing up the truck for. He’d been wanting one for ages; he claims to look like Dumb & Dumber while riding it.
I’ll have to shoot a video soon for comparison. It’s not quite as bad as Harry & Lloyd, but it is really a spectacular sight to see the entirety of Joel folded up and perched on the seat of the Ruckus.
So, that’s life around here. Two new jobs, a couple of road trips, some sewing stuff, and some silly pictures.
Maybe now that all that’s out of the way I’ll get back to blogging on something like a regular basis.
I’ve just bottled up exactly and precisely 50 standard 12-oz brown glass beer-bottles of what I can only hope is mead.
I’ve never made mead before, and I’ve only had it once, but on the strength of what I remember my old boss Jeanne’s mead having tasted like I decided to make some of my own. As I recall, it was basically a sparkling dry white wine with a slight honey flavor.
As I was bottling, I certainly got a serious whiff of white wine scent. Enough so that it was kind of off-putting. I’m not the biggest of wine fans; in fact it can truly be said that I find most wine, and especially dry reds to be akin to something you’d inflict upon someone in a batsu game
For clarification, there had been a quiz show going on and every girl who answered a question right added an unpleasant food to a blender and the girls who got all the answers wrong had to drink a horrible smoothie made out of the mishmash of weird foods.
Anyway, being as I’m definitely not a big wine fan, I’m currently a little bit apprehensive about the fact that I have 50 beer bottles of the stuff aging in the basement. According to my recipe book, it won’t be fit to drink until around New Year’s anyway, so there’s no real way to tell right now, plus also I might not be the best person to judge on it.
I sipped on the wee bit of the leftover mead that didn’t make it into the bottles (about four tablespoons worth) and I think it is going to be okay. There are no foul flavors that would indicate contamination, and it’s not noxiously sweet nor gaggingly sour, nor does it have that horrible sticky texture that puts me off reds so. I understand that is tannin and is supposedly a good thing, but I will have to take others’ words for it. I’m also informed that tea has tannin in it, and I honestly have no problem whatsoever with tea (in fact I really like it) so I’m not so sure I buy that story.
Anyway, I’ve made a crap-ton of mead, and I hope it doesn’t suck.
I’ve been having the devil of a time finding a “safe” place to park my bike at my current job. My first two parking spots were awkward and/or obstructive, so finally one of the secretaries secured permission for me to park my bike in a storage room (the one I now nap in during my lunch break). For the past 10 months, that’s been working out splendidly. I roll my bike in from the loading dock and park it against the wall behind some surplus ladders.
On the other end of the room were a pile of horrible old shitty bikes that had been left on buses and were never claimed by their original owners, either because the bikes were so awful as to be disposable, or because the original owners were to drunk to give a shit.
All of the abandoned bikes had tags banded to their handlebars identifying the bike itself, the bus it was left on, and the driver who turned it in.
Well, apparently there’s a driver who periodically takes the abandoned bikes and donates them to charity.
And today, apparently, he decided to take a load.
A load, which very nearly included MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE BIKE which belongs to me and is definitely not shitty, abandoned, or up for grabs.
NOT ABANDONED, HANDS OFF, THIS MEANS YOU!
I went into the storage room to take my daily lunchtime nap and discovered that my bike (and the rest of them) weren’t there anymore. Predictably, I had a major cow, and tore around the building trying to track down who disposes of the abandoned property.
Eventually with the help of a different secretary than the one who gave me parking permission, I tracked down the bicycle-recycler’s van and recovered my favorite bike from within its confines. As it turns out, he wasn’t paying very close attention to whether the bikes were tagged or not. I’d though mine would be safe since it was parked across the room from the abandoned bikes, was obviously not a heap of shit, and did not have an ID tag on it, but you see what I got for assuming.
I’m not exactly ashamed to admit that during a couple of restroom breaks throughout the afternoon, I popped into the store-room and made sure it was still parked where it was supposed to be, behind the ladders.
It was.
Now, I have a laminated card that I can slip under the brake cable housing on the top tube which reads:
Employee’s Bike
Please do not take!!!!!
And yes, those are an insanity’s worth of exclamation marks. I want everyone to be aware of the kind of deranged loony they’re potentially messing with.
My favorite abandoned house in Kansas City is no more. It was demolished back in May. I’m kind of bummed. It was built in 1888.
On the other hand, my second-favorite abandoned house:
Is currently under rehabilitation, and it looks like whoever’s doing it is doing a nice job of it. I’m going back out with my camera on my next day off to document the improvements.
Joel built me a shelf across the windows in my sewing room so that the “Swiss Cheese Plant) (pictured at right) and the Madagascar Dragon Trees (at left) have a safe and secure home in my sewing room.
Now, they’re above the level where I might accidentally crash into them and bruise their leaves and they’re well out of the reach of Minnie, who LOVES to chow down on the Dragon Tree’s fronds and then barf them up in other areas of the house.
Fucking cat!
I really like the dragon trees. They’ve grown a lot since I took this picture, which to be fair was about two and a half years ago. Despite the cat’s depredations, they’ve grown up and filled out quite a bit, though a lot of the fronds have ragged ends thanks to Minnie.
It is her good fortune that she is so pretty, as she can also be a total pill.
Though to be fair, she’s been a LOT better lately. She’s not half as deliberately aggravating as she used to be. She’s actually quite affectionate and cuddly fairly often and quite a lot less destructive. In part because we’ve Minnie-Proofed the house more effectively, in part because there are some things she couldn’t possibly destroy any further, and in part (and this may be wishful thinking) because she’s just being less bastardy these days.
Ruint: my beautiful armchair and sofa. Fucking cat!
The cats are, as I may have mentioned, banned from my sewing room, partially because they eject loose fur all over hell and creation, and mostly because one or both of them pissed in the milk crate I’d been using to store my mending projects in. You just can’t trust the demented little fur-loaves.
Deceptively cute, devastatingly destructive.
Joel and I regularly and vehemently aver that after these two catbeasts finally die, we will never, ever, not-even-if-you-threatened-us-with-grievous-bodily-harm, ever have cats again. Never!
They’re cute, and sometimes they can be affectionate and/or kind of amusing, but the reward versus trouble ratio isn’t tallying up well from our perspective.
Given the vitality and overall strenuous evil of these two, they’ll probably live for 22 years apiece, meaning I’ve got at least 12-14 more years of cat hair all over the house and 6:00 a.m. yowling wakeup calls.
Apropos of pretty much nothing, Perez Prado’s “Patricia” popped into my head and stayed for the day while I was out riding the trails at Smithville yesterday.
It’s a surprisingly good song to mountain bike to, actually.
Sometimes, I think I go out of my own way to annoy myself. This is called being a masochist, and there’s no good excuse for it other than maybe I’m not so right in my headmeats.
Anyway, I went to a friend’s show at the Honeytree Gallery on First Friday (this past Friday), and that was awesome and excellent and fun. Her wall of art was charming and showed to its best advantage, and I got to meet a couple of other really great women there, with whom I’m probably going to be doing some craft-crap swapping. So that part of the evening was actually fabulous and entirely annoyance-free.
But I had a bit of time to kill before the open house opened, so I decided to mosey around the Crossroads district and look at things.
Sadly, ACME Bicycle Company closed its doors last November, so as is the way of things, a new business has opened in the building that formerly housed my erstwhile favorite LBS. The new tenant of 414 E. 18th St., is a bizarre bazaar dedicated to fortune telling, dream interpretation, aura-cleansing, crystals and semiprecious stones, big flowy cheesecloth skirts, and batik handbags. The place was teeming with vague, diaphanously clad women, so I figured it might also do a brisk sideline in essential oils, which despite my fundamental mistrust of all things woo-woo, are relevant to my interests (perfume making).
So, I locked up my bike and decided to have a look and see what their tenant finish looked like and whether they had anything good smelling on offer.
1. The tenant finish is very PURPLE. The floor is dark purple. The walls are a lighter purple. There are a series of little closets framed out around three fourths of the perimeter of the show-room. These cubicles are, by my inference, booths into which you can abscond with the paranormalist of your choice for whatever sort of hokum they profess to provide. The door frames of these cubicles are gaily painted in the colors of the rainbow. There is glitter on the floor; there are a number of low-slung sofas parked here and there about the main room. There’s a rack of sheer and flowing cotton garments, mostly batik printed. Spaced out in between the doors of the cubicles are some attractive old-fashioned china hutches displaying crystals, semiprecious stones, herb wands, and other such paraphernalia.
2. No, they weren’t selling any perfume ingredients. They had some clear Christmas balls filled with dubious potpourri, and the aforementioned herbal wands, but no oils or extracts.
Determining that they, in fact, had nothing I was interested in, I made for the door but was intercepted by a sonsy, purple-haired matron who pressed into my hand a pamphlet explaining all of their services. She jovially and earnestly recommended that I look into their dream interpretation, aura-manipulation, or fortune telling services. I thanked her for her time and brochure and thanked whatever gods may be that mind reading isn’t really real, otherwise I would have deafened many a third ear with my mental exclamation of “give me a fucking break!”
About a month ago, a couple of different friends of mine recommended that I should check out Antonia Cornwell’s blog, “Whoopee, Yet Another Blooming Blog” or “Whoopee,” for short.
Boy, oh boy, am I glad I did, and I’ll expand on that theme another time (I’ve got to head for work in about 10 minutes) but today I’m just going to say that Ms. Cornwell recently wrote up an entry wherein she posted some pictures of a magnetic chalkboard and its accouterments that she’d devised for the amusement for her three-year-old daughter. This included “magnetic poetry,” magnetic facial features and accessories for jazzing up hand-drawn monsters a la Mr Potato Head, and a lewd statement pinned to the wall by her equally witty husband Ian.
Anyway, to the point, she was mocking herself for amusing her child with such an old-fashioned contrivance as a chalkboard, and claimed that she also only fed her daughter “gruts for tea,” and helpfully included the following video, for those of us who did not have the pleasure of growing up with Ivor Cutler as a pop cultural reference:
I was immediately taken with the word “gruts,” and have determined that if I ever have children to annoy, this is what I will tell them is for dinner if they ask and I don’t feel like discussing it because we’re having leftovers, I haven’t figured out what to make, or I am making something they don’t much like, but that Joel and I do.
My mom did the same with “fried parsnips.” If she didn’t feel like discussing dinner for one of the above reasons or some other undisclosed reason, we were told that it would be “fried parsnips,” and that was the end of that.
And apparently, when I was a little twerp, I was asked what I’d like for dinner on my birthday, and I quite decidedly and distinctly informed my mom that “ba-gah-ghistie” was my choice dish. Now, of course, there’s no such thing as ba-gah-ghistie, so I’m sure Mom just made something that she’d noticed me eating with gusto and called it such. It doesn’t take much to fool a four-year-old.
But, because she and Dad thought the “ba-gah-gistie” thing was really funny, they turned this one around on me, and I was offered “ba-gah-ghistie” as a birthday dinner for years, and also sometimes when I asked what was for dinner, and Mom didn’t feel like discussing it.
I also, in the course of seeking gruts on the Internet, came across this fellow’s blog and have been getting myself acquainted with it. I think he’s going to become one of my regular reads, and will probably soon appear on the ol’ blogroll. He writes passionately about science, beer, poots, silly music, puns, British travel, and silly videos. Evidently a kindred soul, across the pond.
La, la, laaaaa…more of the same, but in a more subtle and refined color scheme. Kind of elegant for being a bunch of crap glued together.
This is meant to be sort of a peacock feather effect in pearlescent sequins and beads. It isn’t actually cockeyed, I just couldn’t get it to not sit cockeyed on the table and I couldn’t get a decent picture of it on my own head!
Yaaay! Garish!
Yoicks! Even more garishererer!
Ultra pink and flowery and leafy.
This here’s a big, purple, pansie-ish spangly thing.
A daisy/pinwheel sort of thing made of old buttons.
Puffball daisies
More of the same, in different colors
A big, pearlescent flowery thing with a little rosette in the center.
Barrette featuring picot flowers and a pinwheel bead
A selection of the above being boxed up for my sister’s birthday.
She also got my first ever tsumami kanzashi because she liked it and I really do think it looks like her style.
I’m also getting ready to make some new hats. Some more cycling caps, ’cause I’ve been selling those again, plus some girly-style winter hats. I have a design in mind for a gathered cloche that has a kind of yin-yang colorblock effect that will be rather dramatic if I can get it to turn out.
