St. David

So my brain feels a little like cornmeal mush, and mostly I want to crawl into bed where it’s warm and read a few pages of a book before I pass out, but I have laundry in the washer and brownies in the oven, so I’m up.  I would be wasting time on facebook, except it’s been so long since I was on there that everything feels like walking into a conversation that’s already halfway through.  So I’m blogging.  Enjoy!

The reason my brain feels like mush is because today I worked eight hours, clocked out and went to a doctor’s appointment followed by an attempt to pick up prescriptions (unsuccessful), then went back to work where I stayed until eight o’clock, over twelve hours since I had clocked in this morning.  These hours are because this week I was informed that the hospital inspectors are on their way, and a big part of the inspection is auditing the employee files to make sure that records of licensures, background checks, certifications, regular evaluations, and current job descriptions (among other things) are all properly present and accounted for.  And it’s part of my job to make sure all of those things are in their proper places in the employee files for them to find.

These are the employee files which, until Monday, were not actually at my hospital, but scattered in various hospitals and medical facilities around the area, depending on where our employees had transferred in from. While I knew that eventually they would all be brought to me, and I’d be in charge of organizing and storing them, I had thought that it wouldn’t be until after we were moved into our real offices.  You see, keeping employee files on the premises requires secure storage, something I didn’t have either in the trailer, or in my little closet masquerading as my temporary office.  The first I knew that they were coming to me earlier was on Monday morning when one of my co-workers showed up in my office, told me that she had a back seat full of employee files, and asked where I would like her to put them.  Even then I didn’t realize the scope of the project.  I thought perhaps we just needed to have the files physically on the premises.  I didn’t connect it to the idea that inspectors might want to actually look at them.  I found that part out late Tuesday afternoon.

The inspectors may be here as soon as next Monday or Tuesday.

Guess what I’m probably doing this weekend!

The good part is that I have help – two of the members of my HR team, plus a temporary helper are actually taking on most of the load.  Plus there’s the police officers who have been endlessly patient about letting us in and out of the locked room we found to store the files, and tonight even helped us carry the boxes back into storage from the nurses’s station where we’d spread things out to work on them.  This is why there are currently brownies in the oven.  Because men who carry heavy things deserve baked goods.   Plus, the pragmatic side of me can’t resist adding, if they know that good things are in store for them if they help you, they’ll be even more willing to help next time.  Not that it was hard to convince them this time around, but still.

In the meantime, I’m taking steps to help make my life more livable.  I’m slowly easing things off my plate.  For example, Indy is going to take over my ESL tutoring gig, and another person is going to carry the key for my regular Tuesday night thing so I don’t have to panic when I’m running late, and you know, like that.  And maybe one day my work will ease off, so I can only work eight hours instead of nine or ten or twelve.  It would be glorious to actually go home while it’s still light out once or twice.  Of course, that leaves less opportunities for flirting with police officers on the second shift, but still.  We must all make sacrifices.  And maybe soon I’ll have more time for things like dancing, or blogging, or actually having a life.  And it will be good!

Our Lady of Lourdes

I am coming to accept that, as things currently are, I am going to be much too busy at work, and much too tired once I get home, to be able to blog during the week.  This is a hard acceptance for me.  I love telling you guys things.  But the way things have been, I’ve been lucky to tear myself away from work after only working ten hours, and then sometimes only because I had somewhere I had to be in twenty minutes.  One side benefit to this is that I’m getting to be friends with the second shift police officers on duty (they don’t like it when you call them Security, and they really are police officers), and then there’s all that overtime pay, but it is rather draining.  I know that officially I’m an Extrovert, but even Extroverts sometimes hit their limit of socialization.

I have hopes that once the hospital is officially open (in about a week and a half), things will calm down a little, and I’ll have a little breathing room.  But until then, I think I’m going to have to keep my head down and just keep plowing through.  So if I haven’t returned your phone call, or finked out on a social engagement, or otherwise haven’t been able to be as present in the rest of my life as my friends and family would probably wish, I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t mean to, and one of these days I will make it up to you, I swear.  Really.

In the meantime, I’ve been learning things like pantyhose is freaking expensive, and unavailable in any form that does not attempt to shame the buyer for their less than acceptable physique.  Seriously, it is impossible to buy pantyhose that does not promise to “shape” you in some way, because obviously the shape you currently are is Not Good Enough.  There is no other kind available.  I looked.  I really looked hard.  But even if you’re a size 2, it seems that hosiery manufacturers think your form could use improving.  And doesn’t that just say it all about our sick, sick society’s approach to women’s bodies?

My other lesson for the week is that it doesn’t pay to become too good of friends with the really cute police officer if his girlfriend works in the ER and is the jealous type.  Seriously, the whole thing is such a surreal mind trip.  From my perspective, I had a buddy whom I viewed with the exact same delight and affection as I view my brothers and some of my male friends.  I was thrilled to have a buddy because, as I’ve mentioned before, my job gets pretty lonely.  I’m pretty much on my own at my location, and while I have lots and lots of customers whom I like, and who like me in return, I don’t really have a team on site, and I don’t have very many buddies.  I don’t know what was happening from his perspective.  All I know was that on Monday we were good friends, on Tuesday she came to get her badge renewed and was not at all interested in my attempts to be friendly, and by Wednesday he was no longer speaking to me or even meeting my eyes.

It was very sad, first because my job suddenly got that much lonelier, and second, because I am the last woman in the world any other woman needs to be jealous of.  I’m not like that.  I don’t do that.  When I was young I made a rule for myself that I would not even make a play for a guy who was already taken.  It wasn’t about the guy, it was about putting a priority on female solidarity.  For me, if a guy is dating, married, engaged, or has even just made it clear that he likes another girl, he’s off limits.  She was in no danger from me whatsoever.  But I lost my buddy anyway.  Sigh.

On the plus side, I just got off the phone with my Uncle C, who is yarn shopping on my behalf at Purl Soho this afternoon.  He had me in the Extended Family Gift Exchange this year, but since he and Aunt C didn’t visit Dayton for Christmas this year (they had just been here for The Duchess’s wedding, after all), he hadn’t been able to get me my present.  He asked me if I wanted money, or special New York yarn, and I said yarn, please! and immediately thought of Purl Soho.  I’ve been reading their blog for a long time, and they always have such pretty stuff!  So today he headed over there, and with me on the phone, examined the various fingering weight yarns, and talked colors while I looked at the options on the computer.  We decided that he’s going to pick two complimentary colors each of Brooklyn Tweed Loft and Koigu fingering, suitable for making colorwork mittens or similar, and have them shipped to me.  I’m excited to see which colors he picks.  Uncle C is a very gifted artist, and I know he’ll choose cool color combinations.

Today I’m enjoying a quiet day at home.  This morning I slept until I woke naturally (an unheard of luxury!), and then puttered around the house some while wearing my new heels for work to break them in.  I gotta tell you, walking in heels takes some getting used to!  It helps that the shoes are super cute, with little cut out details across the toe and around the top, and three little straps across the instep.  My polyester uniforms may be ugly, but by God, my feet will be cute!  In a little while I’ll put on my real shoes and head off to tutoring.  I don’t have many plans for the rest of the day, except putting together packages for Project Valentinus, and maybe doing a little more on the house.  At some point I need to take my uniform skirts over to the Family Homestead so that Indy can help me mark them for hemming.  I have to start wearing them next week, so I can’t put it off any longer.  And before I know it, it will be Monday again.

But let’s not think about that just yet.

St. Blaise

Sometimes, when you start a new job, they don’t tell you what the perks are going to be.  Like really hot security guards.  They don’t tell you about that.  You just have to find out for yourself, the day you meet the head of security (you know, the guy you’ve been e-mailing multiple times a day about security clearances), and he’s six foot plus of manly pulchritude, complete with deep blue eyes fringed with thick, dark lashes, and a quiet, almost bashful manner.  And then there’s his staff, every man of them apparently picked for his ability to turn female brains to jelly just by walking by.  It’s ridiculous.  And of course my new office is twenty feet away from the security desk.  I swear, it’s like working with the cast of Zoolander.  It makes me feel so shallow, but still, the fact that I’ve got so much gorgeousness strolling past my door (and, you know, occasionally stopping by) definitely goes a long way towards making this job a lot more fun.

It helps that  they’ve all been really sweet guys too, at least the ones I’ve talked to.  The other day the one with the amazing eyes saw that I was opening approximately twenty million boxes of uniforms with my not-so-sharp desk scissors, and gave me his special, super-sharp police knife to open them with instead.  It was awesome – the packing tape practically fell off the boxes before I even got around to cutting it.  But then, most of the guys around here have been very sweet.  The IT guys have been almost disturbingly willing, nay, eager to get me whatever I want the instant I hint that I might have been possibly thinking about wanting it.  On Tuesday at lunchtime I told my boss that it would be really nice to have a scanner that I didn’t have to go back out to the trailers to use, and before my lunch was half digested, I had all three guys from the IT department down in my office installing a nice little desktop model that not only scans both sides of a paper at once, but can handle different page sizes in the same scan, and came with Adobe Acrobat.  And it’s not just them.  Our facilities director seems almost upset that I can’t come up with more things that I need.  The mischief part of me is tempted to see how far I can push this, but honestly there isn’t much more that is reasonable for me to ask for while I’m in temporary quarters, and I don’t want to spoil things for the time down the road when I will have real favors to ask.  I just have to hope that they’ll still be in the giving frame of mind when I actually need something!

Besides the abundance of really, really ridiculously good-looking men in my corner of the world, what my life has mostly been since they moved me out of the trailer into the building Monday morning has been busy.  Crazy busy.  Busy like I haven’t been in a long time.  People lined up out my office door and down the hallway busy.  Having to lock my door and hide to eat my lunch sandwich in peace busy.  I think I’ve only been this busy a few times before in my life, and those times mostly involved coordinating movie premieres, or arranging a month’s retreat schedule, housing, and travel arrangements for a traveling youth ministry team, or things like that.  I think this is the first time I’ve been this busy and actually got paid for it.  Which is kinda amazing, if you think about it.  Things have quieted down a little, but I’m still running all day.  I pretty much collapse as soon as I get home.  Wednesday night I fully intended to go to dancing, but then I fell asleep on the couch before I ever got there.  I’m sure that soon things will calm down a little, and I’ll get acclimated to the new pace, and I won’t be so exhausted, but it will take a little while.

In the meantime, this is looking like a very full weekend.  Tonight Grace is having a small bonfire.  I may have possibly instigated this solely for the selfish purpose of having somewhere to burn the pine branches I used to decorate my house for Christmas.  Then Saturday morning is our First Saturday Women’s group in the morning, and a birthday dinner for Mr. T and Fleur on the evening.  On Sunday I’ve heard there’s going to be a football game or something.  The Pessimist has bough a special tv just for the purpose, and is having everybody over to help break it in.  And then it will be Monday again, and I’ll be back at the hospital with the really, really ridiculously good looking guys.

Life is good!

St. Onesiphorus

I’ve been watching movies lately.  This has been a change.  I haven’t really watched many movies since things got crazy before Sae’s wedding.  I used to put movies or TV show DVDs on while I was working on a knitting or hand sewing project, but though I’ve been very busy in the months since then, it hasn’t been with things that allowed for movie watching.  But somehow this weekend I ended up watching  a movie almost every day.  It was pretty sweet.

The first movie was at work on Friday.  It was the last day of the second in command at my new work, so they were having a good-bye luncheon.  They invited me to come, and I cheerfully said I would, though I figured it would be the usual awkward speeches, etc.  But I was so wrong – it turned out to so much more than I ever would have dreamed.

You see, it seems that they and this guy had a running joke going for over a year about the movie Iron Eagle.  It’s a ridiculous 1986 teen flick that’s something like a low-budget mashup of Star Wars and Top Gun.  Very low budget.  Apparently he saw it when he was a teenager, and it made an impression on him.  So for his going away luncheon, the department ordered in pizza, and they watched the movie.  With commentary.  And fast-forwarding to the best scenes.  And rewinding the most ridiculous bits to watch again.  It was wonderful.  I laughed until I cried, then I laughed until I cried again.  I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun at work.

Then on Saturday AnniPotts and Indy came over, and we ended up watching You Kill Me, and obscure movie populated with a breathtakingly star-studded cast.  It’s all about a hit man for a small time mob family in Buffalo, NY, played by Ben Kingsley.  He’s also an alcoholic.  When his drinking makes him miss carrying out an important hit, he gets sent out to San Francisco to dry out and get his life together.  It’s a gorgeous black comedy about addiction and recovery and living an imperfect life.  I loved it.  Not only did it give me a new favorite quote (“Here’s to granting others the serenity to change the things you cannot accept.  And the courage to accept large amounts of change serenely. And the wisdom to know the difference.”), but it led me to discover a new favorite jazz singer: Molly Johnson.  Her song If You Know Love was played over the credits, and has been in my head ever since.

Then yesterday, I decided to finally sit down and watch the movie I’ve had out from Netflix forever: Les Visiteurs.  It’s a very silly comedy starring Jean Reno about a medieval nobleman who gets accidentally transported 1000 years into the future where he meets up with his descendants and has mad hijinks.  They remade it as an American version a few years later, but the remake was never as good as the original.  I watched it long ago, but I was wondering if it really was as good as I remembered.  And it was.  Jean Reno is one of my favorite actors at any time, but the utterly transcendent glow that he brings to his face when his character sees his precious descendants just makes me go all gooey (and also think fondly of Sae’s Baby Schmoo – yes, I know I’m ridiculous).

In other news, autumn decided to descend on us this weekend like a ton of bricks.  It’s ridiculous.  Going from heat warnings to needing a sweater within 24 hours?  Good grief.

Sts. Salome & Judith

It’s funny how life gets so busy all of a sudden.  I feel like I haven’t had a moment to write since Friday.  I know that isn’t strictly true, but yesterday I got as far as writing the title of the day’s blog post, and then never got around to writing another word.  Today I resolved that I had to do better, and come hell or high water, even if I was posting at 11:55 at night, I would post on this blog, no matter what!  And so I am.

Last weekend we moved Sae out of the cute little townhouse she’s lived in for years into the house she’ll be living in with Mr. T.  It felt good to do it.  It felt like the nice epilogue at the end of a book, the part where they tell you what happened to all the characters after the main story was done.   Of course, that doesn’t mean Sae and Mr. T’s story is done, just that they’ve moved from one part into the next.

I was thinking today about how when someone moves, often the moving doesn’t stop with them.  Other people around them are affected too, like ripples moving away from a moving object in water.  It’s not just the FOR RENT sign now outside Sae’s old home, or that a bunch of us spent our Saturday moving instead of whatever else we might have done.  There are lots of other ways that Sae’s move continues to affect the people around her.

For example, when Sae merged her household with Mr. T’s some of her household goods became redundant.  In particular, she didn’t need her kitchen table anymore.  It’s nicer than the one Rosie and I have been using (solid, if battered, wood, big enough to cut out fabric on, with a couple of leaves that expand it to decent dinner-party size), so I said I’d be happy to give it a home.   Consequently, while the rest of Sae’s stuff went into Mr. T’s house, the table instead went into the back of Mom & Dad’s van, and came back up to Dayton.

Yesterday the disassembled table carried into our house, and this morning Rosie decided it was time to put it together and swap it out for our old table.  Unfortunately, when she decided to do this was right when I was coming downstairs with just enough time to spare to make my breakfast, eat it, and get my butt out the door to work.  Breakfast, instead of the peaceful time I use to mentally and spiritually prepare for the day, suddenly became a hectic dodging of random pieces of furniture, flipping pancakes in between coming out to help flip the table over, and moving tables instead of eating.  By the time we were done, I was out of time, and ended up packing my half-eaten breakfast up in a plastic container to eat at my desk at work.

Another person who’s feeling the effects of moving is my dear friend Mai, who is about to close on her first house along with her new husband Nameless.  It seems that this process is proving so traumatic that she’s been moved to start a blog about it (and probably eventually about other things too).  She writes just like she talks (which is to say: awesomely), so I think you should check it out.  And no, I haven’t been paid anything for this endorsement, though I did mention that if she fed me a few pieces of pizza I’d probably help her move.  But that’s another matter.

In other news, it is almost time for the Annual Family Vacation.  This is the time of year when all the available Family members hie themselves off to a distant-ish location together (this time it’s the same cabin in the woods as last year) and Spend Time together.  We haven’t had any casualties yet, though you never know.  Actually, it’s usually a really good time.  We enjoy each other, and we always make sure to do fun things together.  There’s a pool nearby, several hundred acres of forest we can get lost in (should that take our fancy), and small towns nearby where we can terrorize the locals.  (Mwahahahahaha!)

This year’s vacation will be a bit different, since this is the first time we’ve had any In-Laws to include.  Mr. T and Fleur will be coming along with Sae.  (We wish Sunny and Honey were coming along with Big Brother too, but they are all multiple oceans away, alas.)  Fleur and I have already made plans to spend some time making doll clothes for her Christmas Doll.  I’m looking forward to that immensely (nieces are so much fun!).  I will be going down a little late this year, since I’m staying in town through Saturday to attend One and Two’s wedding.  But I’m planning to put my vacation days at home to good use.

And now it’s time for me to go get ready for Wednesday night swing.  I’m going to wear the new skirt I just finished Monday night.  It’s a basic very full skirt, cartridge pleated to the waist, fastened with two vintage buttons from my grandmother’s stash.  It’s a great turquoise paisley border print on 100% linen, which makes it rather stiff and very poufy.  It’s a little shorter than the other skirts I’ve made, which I think makes it even cuter.  As you can tell, I’m loving it.  It’s a skirt made for dancing, and that’s just what it will do.