The Blog With No Name

My husband and another guy at our church won six yoga lessons from a place in Davenport as part of a benefit dinner we were hosting last night. I decided that we could raise further funds by selling seats to watch these two take the yoga lessons. I’d pay, no question…

I went for a nice long walk this morning, four miles (18 minutes per mile, not great but not terrible) in perfect weather. I’m so glad spring came back! I might do this every morning until we leave for DC, to get in gear for Mall Day. As I was walking, a car pulled up next to me; I paused my iPod, expecting to be asked how to get somewhere. Instead, I was handed a few Watchtower/Jehovah’s Witnesses tracts, much to my disgust. How stupid are these people – leaving aside a host of other issues, I didn’t have anywhere to stash the damned things while I was walking! It’s like an engraved invitation to litter. I shared the love by putting them under the windshield wiper of the next car I passed.

I made breakfast today, hoping my kids might be willing to take at least a bite – no dice.

Like a fool, I didn’t photograph it before I put the clarified butter on it – it was poofed up about three inches over the top of the skillet. The recipe calls it a sort of pancake, but given the ratio of eggs to everything else (butter, flour, and milk), it really seems more like a souffle I suppose. Next time -  little bits of ham, or bacon, and ixnay on the butter and powdered sugar. Yum.

I am having a lot of fun with a program I found on lifehacker.com called AutoHotKey. You can find it here. This post is an experiment in using AutoHotKey hotkeys for blogging and HTML. I also now use it at work for quick emails – one keystroke brings up a blank email already addressed to the boss and the parish nurse about a hospitalization, or a blank email check request to the treasurer. Brilliant! Highly recommended.

We survived the weekend, yay! My children actually went to the sunrise service at church with Charles, after getting up unnaturally early and not finding much in the way of surprises from the Easter Bunny (a key? why would the EB leave a key? heh heh heh…..). We intersected at the breakfast afterwards, then they went home and I stayed for the later service, at which I played my cornet as part of a ragtag orchestra. This is the third time that we’ve played, and finally I was able to maintain my lip long enough to make it through the service; Pam, our choir director/organist was also clever enough to get the high notes out of the way early, so the first hymn had the most complicated part for me, and the rest of them were much easier. She is smart, that Pam. (I do really want to get my hands on a piccolo trumpet though, to see what I could do with it.)

We then decorated some eggs to kill time before brunch. I got a tie-dye egg coloring kit and a more traditional set as well. The daughter went for the tie-dye, and made what I can only describe as a Goth-girl egg. The boy made a mess (shocking, I know), and I made a few traditional ones. No one was really very excited about decorating. Don’t know if this bothers me, or relieves me. Maybe next year we can do that instead of spring cleaning (since Easter is going to be two weeks earlier, sigh).

Then off to a local hotel for brunch. About what you’d expect; gobs of people eating gobs of food. The boy and his cousin made a perfunctory effort to eat “regular” food then went for the desserts in a big way – at one point they each had a plate covered in whipped cream, with a few chocolate chips and some cinnamon for color/flavor. Let’s hear it for the sugar high! The boy’s teacher was there, and hauled us off to her table, so that I could say “hello” to her mother, who was my third grade teacher! She’s had three strokes, but by gosh she remembered me and told my son that she had to spank me only once per week, ha ha ha, and that he had a wonderful mother (he agreed with her…). It was nice to see her again, after, um, 32 years. Wow.

We got home at 3:30pm to discover that the Easter Bunny had indeed made an appearance! Yay! The key? It opened the padlock. There was initial trauma when it was discovered that pedaling backward no longer worked for braking, but I think this can be overcome with some patience.

Is there a person appointed to his or her position by George W. Bush, who is not either mentally defective or does not have the moral/ethical sense of Al Capone? I ask this after having skimmed the details of Paul Wolfowitz’s actions at the World Bank. I wonder how large the book would be that contained, in two columns, the moralistic bombast from any given Republican nutjob matched by the fact(s) demonstrating that he/she was in fact utterly full of shit.

I remember thinking, eight years ago or so, when GWB was first running, that, “Yes, he’s a Republican, but gosh, Colin Powell is going to work for him, this might not be so bad.” I could just cry.

The dog pee is all steam-vacuumed away, the dining room chairs and living room carpets look almost brand-new, the dust bunnies are vanquished for the next month or so – we have spring-cleaned (despite the f***ing twenty-below-zero weather, brrrrrr……). I got to mop the wood floors, once we had moved all the carpets out on to the front porch. Charles got to steam-clean everything. As usual, he managed to set my teeth on edge by using whatever was at hand for whatever task he was doing. Need to peel off the plastic seal of the rug shampoo bottle? Don’t get some scissors or a knife, no, grab a PEN of course. Need to measure some of the (probably toxic) rug cleaner into the vacuum? He used one of my baking measuring cups. Now perhaps I’m over-reacting, but I HATE it when non-food items get put into things that are used for food preparation. Yes, we have a dishwasher. It still grosses me out. One of our paring knives is still bent sideways from when he used it to trim an air-conditioner filter one day. IT PISSES ME OFF!

Taken with my new toy, a Canon A550 PowerShot. It dawned on me that my current digital camera was approaching ten years old! Yikes! It’ s not a great photo, because a) I’m not a great photographer and b) I haven’t begun to read the manual, but the neat thing is that I took it from all the way across the pool, with all sorts of zoom action going on. Yay! I can get pictures now where my children are actually recognizable!

Now my daughter is busy reading the manual for her new camera, and taking pictures of her bloody dog.

It dawned on me at some point last night that I am what one of my co-workers would call an “enabler.” I let people (my boss, chiefly) take advantage of my good nature. My mother once wondered, towards the end of her teaching career, whether it was a good thing for her to have the reputation for being “nice” (instead of “terrifying,” I guess). At the time, I thought she was crazy but I am beginning to see what she meant by that.

This is all because I have, as usual, had a bunch of work dumped on me at the last minute that could just have easily been prepared, planned, etc, weeks ago. My boss appears to be allergic to her music staff, because they meet about once every six months for a systematic review of the upcoming season. That’s great, and it (mostly) takes care of Advent and Lent, but the other ten months of the year are treated like crap. The organist resents this because she can’t practice as much as the music requires*, so she feels as though she’s not giving the best performance she could be giving (on a shiny new organ to boot). I, to make sure we’re being legal with the copyrights and so that I don’t get sued for a million dollars and thrown in jail (yes, I’m exaggerating), need to report our music usage to our licensing agency, or get permission from the copyright holder if it is not part of our group. I am here to tell you that calling on Thursday for permission to print something on Friday is fucking tacky. The upshot of all this shoddy planning is that, during the busiest week of the church year (a four-day work week, at that; we all take Friday off), complete with half a morning wasted on a staff meeting, there are three bulletins to be produced, not copied from previous years but created from whole cloth (the denomination publisher’s web site, that is). I spent an hour at home on Monday night working on one of them, and two extra hours today.

I sound so self-righteous, don’t I? But I too am part of the problem – we are one giant oozing mass of procrastination, and it’s a problem for the whole staff. But I am definitely coming to sympathize with the clever coffee cup – “Poor planning on your part does not constitute a emergency on my part.”

Oh, I could bitch for hours. But I cannot change other people, I can change only my reaction to them. This has been a bad week for the reactions, is all. The upshot is that I need another hour per day at my office to cope with all the work associated with a smallish but growing church. Easier said than done.

(*that’s what she tells me. I don’t know if she’s ever brought it up with our boss. I never have either, so what am I bitching about? My husband has given me the official word that he doesn’t want to hear about it any more unless/until I actually *say* something directly.)

“Real Men Wear Pink,” he says.