project 365 #166: child with hailstones

project 365 #166: child with hailstones
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

So there I am, cracking geodes on Pack Square, hanging out with my coworkers, smokin' cigarettes and takin' pictures for my job, when the temperature begins to drop. We're under one of those funky little pop up carnival tents with the geodes and some of the roughly 300 signs I've spent the last week making in Illustrator (which signs have gotten progressively funkier, but that's neither here nor there.) So. It's getting colder and the wind picks up. Then, this very cool hippie lady (one of those super uber hippies who live around here, the kind who have seen everything and done everything and now are living at Earthhaven and yet have maintained a certain modicum of sanity?) comes running over to us and she says, "This tent is gonna go." And we say, "Oh, no, thank you, but we're fine." "Oh yes it is," she says firmly, grasping one of the poles, "I was at a Rainbow Gathering in Colorado one time with one of these and. . . " And just as she said that, the wind began to switch, the house to pitch, and suddenly the hinges started to unhitch.

Then the rain kicked in. I said, "If we get it in further towards the building it'll block some of the wind!" as three people, a tent and two buckets of rocks were lifted skyward. Somehow, with the help of another magical materializing guy, we got it in towards Pack Place JUST as the hail began to really hit. This is when I booked for the door and left the three of them there. Not because I'm an abject coward (although I am, and the hailstones PLUS the lightning PLUS the wind PLUS the thunder PLUS the river that was washing around our feet got to me a bit) but because I am a Photographer. Goddamnit. And I took pictures. And it was all very exciting and kind of felt like a 70s Sci Fi movie as people flocked around the windows and it was all lit up inside while outside some kind of wacked out weather apocalypse was going on and all our other coworkers came dashing up from the museum downstairs to see if we were still alive and/or to bring the tents in and we watched the one stranded volunteer near the flume wait patiently and I bummed a cigarette from a friend of mine and her little girl, pictured here, dashed in and out collecting hailstones.

High drama at work. I don't get a weekend for another seven days, so stuff like this must sustain me. Which isn't hard, since it was AWESOME. Also awesome is coming home to an empty house, putting on sweats, sitting back with a smoke and just, thank the gods, not having to talk to anyone or do anything for anyone or anything at all but just be. Right now at work I have to be nice all day to tons of people and run around and be helpful and stuff. I'm actually very good at this but it takes a toll and when I get home? I simply cannot be around homo sapiens at all, and since I don't have to right now, it's glorious. Oh, and when I got home? The deck was dry. No rain, no hail here in West Asheville, maybe five odd (very odd) miles from downtown.

Project 365 #25: troll doll in hole in wall

Project 365 #25: troll doll in hole in wall
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

They are finally going to get around to replacing the drywall in my effing office. It's been over a month but I have recently started pitching fits and that has sped the process up. The joys of non-profits - most people wouldn't get to have an office with freaky large giant holes in the drywall around them, behind which lurk huge noisy strange pipes. Yeeesh.

That's my actual office below, btw. This above is the hallway going into my office, with handy troll sized hole, in case you are really small and don't want to use the door.

Shark's Teeth

Today at work, a group of severely mentally handicapped children came in for a class. I mean, these are kids with really serious problems - tards, as we used to call them. Before you get mad at me for linking to Tard Blog, hush up. Sure she's evil. And her blog is all ended now anyway. Still, she was funny as hell, and she was working with those kids every damn day, which is probably more than you're doing, and definitely more than I'm doing, and so she got, in my book, a free pass on some serious gallows humor.

At any rate, one of the boys today was a little out of control. He was more out of control than the boy who kept coming in and out, panting and saying "Drink water! Drink water? Drink water!" and more out of control than the swaying girl and the boy with the big, huge scar that ran up and down the back of his head and neck. This boy had a devilish grin and more motor control than most of the kids. He came swooping by the front desk, where, as you know, there is a basket of free shark's teeth. He grabbed a whole handful of sharks teeth as he dashed by.

And ate them.

That made his aide angry and she was yelling at him and pulling them out of his mouth - and dropping them back into the basket with the rest of the sharks teeth even as I tried to stop her.

It's not that I'm prejudiced against the disabled - I'm not keen on anyone's drool in the shark teeth basket. I wouldn't let the Pope spit in the shark teeth, frankly. It's bad enough that a hundred little kids a day root around in there with their grimy little fingers - saliva is de trop.

The aide was actually more interested in shopping and talking to the other aides, though, than she was in watching her charge. I don't entirely blame her, but on the other hand, perhaps she might have stopped him before -

He came through again and grabbed another handful of teeth! This time I said "Oh, no, no, honey, those aren't for eating, they're not good for you, they don't taste good!" which I grant you is fairly idiotic but some of those teeth are sharp as hell and I can't imagine that they'd go down easily. So the kid paused, with a few shark's teeth in his mouth and the rest in his hand, grinned wildly, and flung the teeth all over the gift shop. And my desk. And just around. Which, you know, totally made the field trip for the third graders from the nice charter school who were all at the time standing there gaping. And the damn aide started picking up the sharks teeth off the floor and off my desk and (naturally) pulling them out of his mouth and putting them back in the basket while apologizing all over again.

"Oh no," I said, "Really, it's fine. Really, I'll clean it up. I'm just worried about him! I think eating those teeth could be dangerous."
"He's eaten everything else," said the aide darkly, "A few teeth won't bother him one bit."
And then she put a few more spitty sharks teeth and some gross carpet gluck from the floor into the shark tooth basket and went back to the gift shop. And I hid the basket and gave everyone my best great big fake customer service smile.

Printer Vigil

I'm at work. Why am I at work after 6:00 pm on a Friday night when I've been here since 8:30 this morning? Because I am sitting here with the printer like it's my sick friend, except maybe I mean my sick arch enemy, for I am not feeling particularly sympathetic or kind towards the printer. It's true that I'm asking it to do a lot - some 125 sheets of card stock - but it's done that before without freaking out like this. And this has to be done before tomorrow, and it shouldn't have taken this long, and, well, you can guess the rest.

Argh. It strikes me though, that sitting late with the printer, keeping vigil, has become some kind of weird rite of passage in our culture, kind of like a knight kneeling on the cold, cold stone all night (usually authors say "cold, HARD, stone" but this has always bothered me because, come on, obviously the stone is hard. I work at a rock museum and you can take it from me: 99% of the time stone is hard, and even when it's kind of soft, like gypsum or talc, it's still hard if you're kneeling on it. You should say cold, HARD mud, or cold, HARD feathers, but not stone.) Or maybe not. It's almost done! OMG! I think I might be able to leave this place tonight after all! Bye!

Alpha Dog

Puppy is the alpha dog now. We pretend his name is Django, but he doesn't know it and we don't call him that. We call him Puppy, because this is a household of four fairly bright, fairly creative, extremely verbal types. . . who call their puppy Puppy. I realized that he had become the alpha dog today, when Theo stood back gloomily and let Puppy have his pick of the doggy dinners. For a while there, Theo was in charge of which dog ate out of which bowl; this was a time in which Theo grew fat. Now, though, Theo hangs his head and lets Puppy have the first go at both bowls.

My first emotion was to feel sad for Theo, but then I realized: Theo doesn't want to be the alpha dog. I empathize strongly with that, because I'm not alpha either. I know I'm not alpha because I went to one of those PR meet n' greet thingies this afternoon with some of the WNC tourism movers and shakers. I used to dread these thingies and not take them seriously but nowadays I have decided that my ass depends on networking like a motherfucker. So I am networking, which isn't really too hard, because at this point I've actually known most of these people for years (and by know I mean seen at a bunch of cardboard chicken luncheons and smiled and exchanged business cards with) and they're all really pretty nice and so what the hell? I'm going to get a new boss sometime soon and if s/he isn't to my liking, I'll be back out there with the resumes. This is how I know I'm not an alpha: I am not applying to be my own boss, and several people I saw this afternoon who hadn't seen me since my year's hiatus from the tourism scene said, on hearing about my place of employment, "Oh, did you take the director's job?"

No. No, I didn't, and I don't want it, and frankly I don't want to be in charge of anything at all, really. If I was in charge at a real job I couldn't fiddle around with photoshop or do elaborate Excel to Word mail merge letters, which, take it from me, is the absolute best thing to do when you're hopelessly hungover at the office, which might have happened to you the day after Halloween. I know that this state often happens to people the day after Halloween, because some people are incapable of staying quietly home on Halloween and instead must go off to the bars to see the costumed masses and in the process drink entirely too much beer and stay up until quarter to two in the morning, which is a really bad idea on a Tuesday night.

That is why some people are not out at Drinking Liberally but instead are quietly at home on this Thursday night, like the actual dedicated and good employees and homebodies and mothers and carer for alpha Springer Spaniel puppies that they, in fact, are, despite their occasional resemblance to wild drunken revelers. But you see, if you are an alpha dog, you can't ever shed those responsible moments and act like a wild drunken reveler but instead must be sober and responsible at all times: among other, more pressing reasons, you'll be the first one called when the alarm goes off for no apparent reason at 2 in the morning, and if you'd been revelling, that could get ugly. So fuck being alpha. I can take being second at the food bowl if it also means that I get to be second or third when the shit hits the fan.

On Being A Celebrity

So I go into work on Wednesday morning (just for the record, for once it is not my own lameness that causes this blogging lag. No, just this one time, it is the fault of blogspot/blogger. I could at this point insert some undeserved vitriol towards them since they were down much of yesterday or I could say, which I will, thank the gods they exist, and honey, this is FREE, and so anyway. . . back to our regularly scheduled programming.) and I'm a celebrity. My bosses watched CNN, my friends watched CNN, friends I haven't even spoken with for three years watched CNN and a coworker who didn't even know I was going to be on grabbed me to tell me she saw me on CNN. Yes. I am famous now and apparently people on DailyKos were slamming us all for not having team spirit and supporting Heath Shuler unconditionally, for which I say to them, fuck off. Heath Shuler is anti-choice and anti gay marriage and for those two things alone I will be GOD FOREVER DAMNED if I support him unconditionally. I'm supporting him because he is, a) the lesser of two evils and b) because he is not Charles "Darth Vader" Taylor and c) because he is pro universal health care and pro union and d) because he is earnest and honest and trying very hard and e) because his campaign staff is doing this for love and not for money and f) because he named his kids cute names and f) because he is, yes, extremely cute. And also because I am a dead yellow dog Democrat, for better or for worse, or until we finally get a third and fourth and fifth party in this country who will actually represent my own personal political wishes, which are not aligned with the Demopublicans at all but instead favor accountability and the crushing of the corporatocracy and the question, what can governments do for their citizens, to wit, health care and time off and limits on the credit card companies and food for the children and the artists. God damn it.

I watched Iraq for Sale tonight and while I can't really recommend it wholeheartedly in the spirit, say, in which I would wholeheartedly recommend Mars Attacks , still, if you want to see something utterly depressing and sobering, I recommend it. The gist of it all is that there are far too many private contractors in Iraq, making horrifying bazillions of tax dollars doing things that we shouldn't be allowing them to do. This is not really a huge surprise to anyone who is even slightly politidcally aware, but it does bring it all together in a chillingly thorough way, plus a lot of very sad and depressing interviews with families of people who went over to Iraq apparently naively expecting that these companies wouldn't send them into the line of fire which is, of course, exactly what happened and then these people died. I will say that if you take a job with Halliburton and they send you to Iraq you are really kind of staggeringly innocent if you think you're not going to get shot at, but still, in the larger sense, the growth of "private contractors" in this country from the truly horrifying like the interrogators at Abu Ghraib to the small and sad like any given clerical employee at your favorite telecom is a large and terrible evil worthy of record and eradication.

And now I must go and do the dishes because I seem to have been talked into a written private type contract with my son whose dish night it is supposed to be, in which I will do his dishes tonight and then I get to take actual pictures of him for 10 days, except I'm not allowed, of course, to blog them. Hmmmmmm. Perhaps it is unwise to sign contracts when you get home from Drinking Liberally.

Oooooh, Shiny!

I went on a field trip today at work - a very dangerous field trip, as it turned out, a field trip into the dark valley of temptation: a field trip to the wholesale gem and jewelry show at the Civic Center. Yes. Wholesale gems and jewelry, scattered across a bazillion tables in a huge room full of bright lights that made all the multitude of strings of beads extra, extra shiny. They were so shiny. And all of them were so incredibly cheap that my self control just snapped and my magpie instincts took over. The good news is that approximately 1/6 of my Christmas shopping is now done. The bad news is that I spent 1/3 of my saved Christmas money for a ratio that is really, in the cold light of home, rather distressing.

I spent money on ridiculous things. I bought a jade alligator. And three Halloween charm bracelets, and two hair clips with skull & crossbones on them - the skulls have rhinestone eyes! Is that too cute or what? - and, uh, a couple of pairs of earrings and some pendants and a bracelet and, um, another stone creature that looks kind of like a cross between an alligator and an aardvark and possibly some other stuff that I don't remember too clearly, like a boar tusk and a couple of aliens carved out of bone. It was the shininess of it all, and all the signs saying 50% off marked price and. . . and. . . there's no excuse. I've just been spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave lately and it is true that I have the instincts of a drunken, sailing magpie at the best of times, eccentric taste and no self control.

I even bought some beads in a sort of hopeless, doomed, last ditch attempt to redeem myself by pretending that I would make jewelry with them and sell it, thus recouping my losses! Yes! And pigs will sprout those proverbial wings, etc. I came home and made two bracelets while I was having my brain sucked dry by M's science and math homework. "No offense, Mom," said M, peering over my shoulder, "But your crafts suck." Alas, he is right. They are shiny, my bracelets. . shiny. And if I was five, they would be excellent but somehow, they are, uh, lacking that subtle je ne sais quoi, that certain something that marks objects as having been created by a mentally competent artistic adult. Which is partly because they keep falling apart, since I'm not very good at tiny knots, and partly because, well, stringing shiny beads on a piece of elastic string, while brilliantly good for recovering brain tumor patients and the criminally insane, just is not a technique that really cuts it in the world of serious jewelry.

Ah well. I'm way broker now than I was this morning, and I was not flush this morning. But I am bedecked. I have jewelry all over me. And a jade alligator to admire (he is a handsome fellow indeed) and a whole bunch of shiny beads all over the dining room table, safely dragged back to my nest where I can stare at the shiny for a nice long time.

The Yellow Jacket

Today I went out of the office to smoke a cigarette at around 3:00 pm, as is my wont, whatever the fuck a wont is. Certainly it's my habit, and thank god, really, that I smoke, because otherwise whole weather systems would pass me by, locked in hundreds of feet of solid concrete and mineral specimens as I am. I mean, Armageddon may have come and gone by the time I emerge from the office: I'll never know. So I spend a lot of time in the Rhino courtyard, smoking alone, feeling every inch the social pariah and getting on first name terms with the cardinal family and the mysterious worms that mysteriously emerge from solid pavement every time it rains and then, of course, not mysteriously at all, die horrible deaths at the hands of the cardinal family. Nature: it is a mystery. Mmmmm hmmm.

And today it was even more of a mystery than usual, because I smoked my 3:00 cigarette, bid a wistful goodbye to daylight and the sky, and went back inside to chop membership forms at which point I became hideously aware that something large and angry was buzzing around in my hair. "help!" I called softly from the kitchen, as I tried to brush it out. "Help! HELP!!" and my coworker finally heard my pleas and ran out to help me. Sure enough, yellow jacket. She got it out of my hair without either of us being stung, utterly amazingly, and proceeded to stamp it into oblivion with extreme prejudice while I waxed eloquent equally with thanks and with the still bitter memory of the yellow jacket in a soda can who stung me on the upper lip in 7th grade. That sting, positioned directly in the center of my lip, caused it to swell up to National Geographic proportions. For several days. In which my unfeeling mother forced me to go to school.

That was horribly cruel and I'd never do such a thing to my own kids, unless, of course, they were really getting on my nerves. Heh. But I'm over it though. Really. I mean, seriously, I'm so over it.

All Good

So, things are really pretty good right now, despite the fact that yes, I confess, I went to Mall Wart this evening and it was every bit as horrendous as one might think. I know that a visit to the Store of Evil is a sign of weakness and lack of resolute purpose on my pansy liberal ass but I wanted to buy a whole bunch of disparate stuff at once and still get home in time to serve dinner at the sophisticated and continental hour of 8:30 p.m. Those women's magazines that tell you never to eat after 7 have clearly never tried to juggle kids, job, dog and so forth, because there is no way, on the night before the first day of high school, that you can make it home before 7:30. Also, I ended up buying 4 quarter goldfish (they cost a quarter; I didn't buy 4 quarters of a goldfish and plan on reassembling him at home) and really, the only place where you can buy horrible frozen breakfast crap, pork chops, boy's jeans, pastel sharpies AND live goldfish is, of course, Mall Wart. And I neeeeeeeeded those things.

So it looks like I have a real and permanent job, and I'm really happy about it. Watch out, friends and acquaintances, because in my job I also look for volunteers, and volunteers make MY life easier; thus, QED, YOU need to volunteer, about which there will shortly be tons more on Blog Asheville. All this has made me realize that although I'm frantic and busy and zooming around (mental note: having 5 cups of serious black coffee is not a good idea when you can't leave the museum unattended to go to the bathroom) I'm actually enjoying myself, feeling challenged and cheerful and hey, the kids are okay, my mom is okay, the dog is okay and the cat is okay. And the new goldfish, while their lives may be short (I'm not sure if the old goldfish are still alive, and if they are, well, sayonara kids, because Uncle & Auntie are easily 4 times your size and they hongry) at least they will be interesting and fraught with the glory that is an outdoor setting as opposed to an aquarium.

I'm knocking on wood, but things are great. And I won best post of the day on Metafilter which makes me feel truly warm and fuzzy and Sally Fieldish (which you can see from my last post in that thread, oops, oh well) because it was on a subject near and dear to my heart and not designed to win a contest, which contest I had completely forgotten existed. On top of all that, my library books were not that overdue, and I rented Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which I fully plan on watching extremely soon. Or as soon as I finish the pork chops, collards and sweet potatoes that will hopefully make up for the Thai curry debacle last night.

Back to Work Blues

I have rejoined the 9-5 world, and while I genuinely like my new job (and boy howdy does it ever present some "interesting challenges." Hoooo yeah.) getting readjusted to the schedule is ridiculously hard. I mean, I did this for YEARS. I was the original underpaid overworked single mother rushing around in the nice black pumps putting the kids in the minivan with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches clutched in their chubby hands for breakfast. And yet, doing that now, when my youngest child is 14 and reminds me daily that he really no longer needs me and I am in fact an active embarrassment to his social life, seems damn near impossible. I can't seem to juggle the way I used to. By the time I get home and start making dinner (if I make dinner; we had pizza three times this past week) it seems to be like 9:00 at night. And if anything else interferes with the daily routine, like a friend's birthday or going to South Asheville to see my mom? It's all over and the whole damn thing is blown to hell in a handbasket.

I know I'll adjust eventually, but just now it's all making me a bit down. I got all depressed in the supermarket the other night, particularly when the beer buying drunk in line behind me started commisterating with me about getting old. Damn him. He was supposed to pretend like he thought I was 20, doesn't he know that? Heh. I calmed down anyway - hell, if the laundromat and the supermarket in combination didn't depress me, I wouldn't be human.

Fliss' Day

If you were me (and a close friend has said, "That's why everyone loves your blog! They can read it and thank god their lives aren't like that!) than your day would have gone like this:

7:45 a.m. wake up out of interesting dream to sound of horrible alarm
7:45 - 8:00 a.m. deny possibility that you are waking up, vastly prefer dream life, cling hopelessly to dream in which life is sane, also, you were married to a very sexy man.
8:00 - 9:20 a.m. get up. Make coffee. Turn on computer, pay bills, discover that you are out of cheques and you've forgotten your online bill paying password, discover that car insurance people say you didn't pay last bill, snarl at daughter who meekly asks what you are doing, apologize to dog for not walking him, frantically remember that paid employment requires you to be in place at a certain time, i.e., 9:30 a.m., freak out, make lunch, take shower, run out door without lunch or cel phone.
9:30 a.m - 5:00 p.m.: The Work Day is Full of Discoveries
****1. Discover that previous people in your new position interpreted "filing" as "throwing in big heap on floor."
****2. Discover that new coworkers think you are a tool for evil management (it is true, actually, you are) and thus hate you forever.
****3. Discover that although you thought YOU were disorganized, compared to previous people in your new job you are actually Martha Stewart on crystal meth in the organization department.
****4. Discover that you can gasp a lot.
****5. Discover missing lunch. Curse. Buy turkey sandwich.
****6. Discover missing cel phone. Curse. Call son. Demand that he read first two chapters of school summer reading book before departing to adolescent happy land, a.k.a. his gang of fun friends who apparently have no parents. Son hangs up. Envision son in Dickensian land of carefree albeit tattered teenage orphans. Curse more. Get jealous.
****7. Run into one of oldest, closest friends in world, who is in town for Tom Waits concert. Remember guiltily that you had agreed to host many old friends here for said concert.
****8. Work feverishly, dash out door.
5:15 p.m. Walk to auditorium, run into plethora of old friends, walk to Jack of the Wood with them.
5:20 p.m. Call kids and apologize; it's okay, they're already gone. Feel that this is a bit unfair. Remember when they were little. Realize that they no longer need you. Thank the gods.
5:20 - 7:45 p.m. Drink heavily with old friends. Say, "Do you remember. . " way too much. Smile a lot.
7:45 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. Old friends leave for concert. Run into other group of unexpected friends who are mourning dearth of Tom Waits tickets. Drink more beer with them.
9:00 p.m. Come home. House is hot as hell. Put on sexy nylon slip because it is coollest thing you own. Put on rubber clogs. Take out compost bucket in sexy nylon slip & rubber clogs. Dump it in compost pile. Water vegetable garden in sexy nylon slip and rubber clogs. Dump compost bucket full of water on gourds at bottom of garden. Think that there is something perverse in all this, but be unable to put your finger on it. Hope devoutly that neighbors can't see you, but still, kind of weirdly enjoy rinsing out compost bucket while wearing sexy nylon slip . . . and rubber clogs.

A Boring Post

I haven't got a thing to say, except that I've been typing little numbers into the computer all day long and half the night and as a result I may be blogging somewhat less in the near future. But I'm making money, yeah wahoo, which is good since I need to spend it all on my computer so I can enter little numbers in the future. It's a circular world, isn't it? I need a new monitor: my old one died and I'm using A's, borrowed from her room, which means that the kids can't play Sims in there, which is leading to a summer of some discontent. Monitors are surprisingly expensive, sheesh. I also need another hard drive, although not the kind that will eat my music again, please, and an actual working CD drive/burner. What I have right now is one overtaxed and overfull hard drive and two elderly, fussy, cranky CD drives that will no longer burn anything. They work (by work, I mean recognize a disc and even access the stuff on it) sometimes and sometimes they don't. They need long rests in between work shifts and if they don't get their beauty sleep they seize up altogether. This is not good, because as we all know, my virtual life is far more interesting than my real life, and if it goes away I will start to shake and see pink elephants and stuff, I mean more than usual, and that will just not be good. So, since crunching little numbers means getting a little paycheck, crunch numbers I will. Yeah.