The Blog With No Name

I am a prisoner of my favorite toys, like a fly stuck in amber in a bad SF movie. I lovelovelove my Palm Centro, but Palm doesn’t make it any more, no one writes software for it any more, and none of the new groovy calendar- and contact-syncing web sites work with PalmOS any more. I love MS Money on my computer and Ultrasoft Money on my Palm (they talk to each other! perfectly!) but Microsoft has discontinued Money and won’t be supporting it after the end of the year. Eventually my Centro will die (noooooo……….) or my computer will totally crash, and then how will I track my finances as perfectly and easily as I do now? I am whining. I still don’t trust Mint or Wesabe or those totally-online “solutions.” Maybe I’m wrong. But I’m going to take really good care of my phone!

School is back in session. The daughter is is eighth grade, and will, I hope, soon be in the jazz band. The jazz band rehearses at 7:00 a.m. Getting her there on time is going to be, um, interesting.  The boy has a new teacher, who looks like she’s 14 (everybody looks like he or she is 14 to me now), but who seems to be on the ball and has placed him so that she can keep an evil eye on his desk. She does not allow messy desks! Yay!

The booster group at his school seems to have attracted a few new and potentially-really-active people, so we are trying to think of ways to give them some meaningful work but not so much that they run away in terror. Ideas?

The paper budget at her junior high school has been cut by 2/3. PAPER. As in, NO PAPER. So in addition to lunch money, it seems I might be buying cases of paper to donate to the school as well. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY.

Hey, other than that, it’s been a great day. Weather finally turned warm, we went to the pool, had lunch with some friends, every day should be this way.

I have a baaaaad attitude these days at work. No one tells me anything, I haven’t had any sort of a review in over a year, I have no direction, and I’m just bored. More interesting things to do at home. Like, right now, I’m about to go make some bread (yes, it’s July 1st, and it’s 65F outside. WTF?). Then back to the library. Honestly, staring at a wall is more interesting than work these days.

My boss occasionally indicates that she is amused at the idea that I’m stressing out about something, usually a machine that is not doing what I think it should be doing at that exact minute, or something that has to be done fastfastfast (usually because she hasn’t mentioned it until the last minute), like today – there was a funeral at my work church which I decided to attend, and we needed more bulletins. So the funeral director was standing there taking them as they came out of the printer. I was annoyed because I’m not used to printing them that way; I usually run them off on this really neat-o high speed offset printer thingie we have. The laser printer is sllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww by comparison. So there is my boss out in the hallway saying, “Mary looks like she’s on the edge, I’ll just stay out of her way, etc etc.” What the fuck is it to her? Is it amusing? Does she get points? She seems so smug when this happens. I wasn’t even stressed until I heard her gloating, and then I just got PISSED OFF. It reminds me of the USSR, that very Soviet attitude – “I’m unhappy so you have no right to be happy, no matter how much harder you are willing to work than I am – we’ll all be equally miserable.” My boss is disorganized and thrives on chaos, so she feels she must bring it to everyone else’s work life? FUCK THAT. *This* is what will drive me to hunt for a new job.

A ladder just fell on my face. My glasses are bent, and I imagine that tomorrow morning I will have a truly spectacular bruise on my left temple. Not to mention a really fun headache. I will post a photograph.

(Charles was trying to climb up on the roof. The ladder wasn’t quite tall enough to reach, but it was tall enough to be unmanageable. I’m sure we looked like a Keystone Kops routine in action trying to get the stupid thing down on to the ground.)

So Sarah Palin’s 17 year old daughter is pregnant. She plans to marry the father, well that’s such a comfort. And here we have this, from the AP:

“Prominent religious conservatives, many of whom have been lukewarm toward McCain’s candidacy, predicted that Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy would not diminish conservative Christian enthusiasm over the vice presidential hopeful.”

Why do I imagine that were this happening to Joseph Biden, we would never hear the end of it?

If you have car trouble, and have to call your insurance company’s roadside assistance, take a picture of the truck when it gets there. That way, if the complete f***ing asshole who patches your flat tire also happens to take off one standard lugnut from each tire and replace it with one for which your dealer doesn’t have a socket, so that when you have driven all the way across town for a tire rotation that can’t be performed, you can call the jerk and have HIM come rotate the tires, instead of paying another $40 (and driving across town again) to have the dealer do who-knows-what to finally get the things off.

Bastards.

So there has been this bike lurking around in our alley for a few days – I think it started out as an OK bike, but the seat is a little beat up, and the squishy stuff on the handles is worn away, and so on. We’ve all been staring at it, wondering to whom it belongs, why did they leave it here. Charles came home from camping out last night, and asked me whether I had loaned *his* bike out to anyone. Turns out his bike has been stolen right out of our garage, and whoever did it just left his old one there next to our driveway!! Duh!!!

The scary thing is, this is the second time such a thing has happened. The first time was last summer; our babysitter’s bike was stolen right out of our front yard.

The moral of this story is, I need to make sure the garage is locked more often. Don’t let the kiddies take the key out there and then leave it unlocked.

I am in a monumentally bad mood, and have been all day. Perhaps not co-incidentally, my car is full (to the point where my nice neighbor is loaning me her car tomorrow morning to take the kiddies to school) of obsolete computer equipment that I have collected from work and church and various individuals. I am going to recycle it at the electronic demanufacturing facility in Davenport, Iowa. I wonder whether, once my car is empty, I will feel better. I always feel like the clutter is weighing me down, waiting to pounce on me, and in my car right at this moment that is literally true – heaven help me if I have to stop suddenly, I’ll get a monitor straight to the back of my skull.

(Of course, I could also be in a bad mood because my children are complete dorks, but it’s more fun to be all metaphysical about it. Plus, I have just started reading It’s All Too Much.)

Went to DC. Had a great time. Holocaust Museum – stunning. American Indian Museum – also stunning. Possibly the two best-designed museums I’ve ever visited.

I have gotten as far as moving our photos from the digital camera to my computer. Next step – getting the kids (esp The Boy, who seems to have photographed every item at the Air and Space Annex) to pick which photos they want to have online to show their classmates. Will be on Flickr Real Soon Now, I promise!

Got all over the place (even out to Dulles to see the Air and Space Museum Annex [space shuttle!!!]) by public transportation, thanks to Charles’ l33t Metro-website-surfing skillz. Feeling somewhat smug about that. Also, SMS (text-messaging) plus Google equals PURE AWESOME. I found addresses, opening/closing times,  phone numbers, etc etc that way.

I noticed that most of the jobs previously seen to be held by African-Americans in DC (e.g., McDonald’s staff) are now held by Spanish-speaking people, presumably (but not inevitably? I’m trying not to leap to conclusions here…) immigrants. I would not have thought this possible when I lived here twenty years ago.

I dined with Merujo *waves* in a part of town that, twenty years ago, you could not have dragged me there with a Mack truck, such would have been my fear of being mugged/accosted by drug dealers/etc. Now, staggeringly, they have a by-God TARGET STORE in the area.

I want to know where all these non-gentry people are living now that their neighborhoods are being taken over. You can’t just wave your roll of architect’s drawings and make that many people *vanish*. This can’t be healthy.

Back home. Kids tired of school. All tired of the DAMNED WEATHER. My daughter’s re-introduction to soccer games in pouring rain and freezing wind did nothing to make the sport appeal to her, oh well.

I am applying the “you can do anything for 15 minutes” principle to making a listing of the parochial archives stored (improperly) in my office. I figure that the synod might be marginally more interested in at least some of them if I can tell them just what we have. Keep y’alls fingers crossed on that one, please.