Soul to the world

I got my keys to the house yesterday. Of course, I'm going to New Orleans for a wedding tomorrow, so all preparations are put on hold until next week. Have to get the locks changed (no reflection on the sellers; they're wonderful and will probably be around to visit and receive divided irises later this summer), paint the purple room a color less purple (actually don't mind the purple, but it's too, er, stimulating for an office), do a little work on the floors.

And priority number one, as identified by my mother, is to install blinds and curtains. The house came with some nice window treatments, especially the lovely, gauzy green and yellow sheers in the LR and DR. But, I will add mini-blinds to the LR since it faces front, next to the front door. Mom's special phrase for vulnerability due to lack of window treatment is "soul to the world."

I admit I like to cover the windows late at night b/c otherwise the imaginary skulker can look in and see me doing the mundane things I do when I'm alone. But mom is exaggerated in her worries. She's talking bedsheets over windows for the interim. These are the moments when I start getting claustrophobic and feel the need to start yelling. Also when she asks for a key but promises not to come over if I'm not there, then in the next breath talks about taking a friend, unannounced, to see my sister's house.

It's going to be interesting!

Homeowner at last!

A home all one's own

So, today was the big day, and I closed on my house. There was a lot of last-minute angst about whether or not it would get to be today. For a short moment, I even almost cried. But, everything went fine, all the signing of papers and shaking of hands. My realtor, who is awesome (if you ever move to my town, use my realtor), brought me a bottle of champagne. She and my mom are new best friends; they're planning to go out to lunch together.

Everyone talks about how you sign a million papers at closing and it's so scary and weird, but I'm here to tell you I signed a lot more papers and took a longer time when my applied for the loan and made the offer. That initial deal took place from about 6-9:30 one night after work and was fraught with much more uncertainty. Would the sellers take my offer? Was I gambling by bringing the price down? Was I picking the right loan, or would I get screwed on it? Those questions seemed much more urgent, and I was hungry and exhausted by the end. I got some takeout on my way home and crashed ASAP.

By contrast, the closing took place around 3 pm on a beautiful spring afternoon. I kept thinking to myself, “I can take a nice walk after we finish here.” We drove past the house on the way home. One of the neighbors was walking her dog, and she waved. I get the keys tomorrow, and then it will be more real. Actually, it won't be real until things are painted and I'm moved in. Since I'm going out of town Thursday, I have to put it out of my mind somewhat for the next few days and just focus on functioning at my job and on my trip.

Easter weekend was lovely. The very best part of all was that I got a surprise visit from Miss M.C., who breezed in from Little Rock. She got to see the house, and it made me so happy to share the excitement with my friend. She is only the second friend to see the house up close, and the first to see it inside, completely. She pronounced it a great success, which is important. Of course I want my friends to approve.

I also took baby steps toward re-finishing two wooden chairs for my dining room. As luck would have it, we discovered that my dad did the really nasty part of the job-stripping the old finish, some years ago. I'll have to go back and strip a little more, then sand, re-finish, replace the feet. They are the perfect chairs for short people. I apologize in advance to my tall friends, as my house will be filled with furniture for short people.

MY house. I can't believe I own property. This fact arouses all sorts of weird instincts, like wanting to patrol the perimeter like a border collie, or pee in all four corners of the yard. I can see myself, the crazy lady who yells at kids to get out of my yard and stop trampling the flowers. Yes, a new day is dawning.

Death by barbecue sandwich

I'm not generally a big fan of barbecue (which is blasphemy, since I live in barbecue city), but I had a lovely smoked/pulled chicken bbq sandwich with cole slaw and beans. And now I think I am going to die. It's sitting in my stomach like an anvil out of a Roadrunner episode. In fact, I've felt this way several times over the past few weeks. Buying a house will do that.

If I were an overweight, older man, I would wonder if I was about to have a heart attack. Which reminds me that last weekend I made a terrible social faux pas by asking my friend if he'd had his cholesterol checked. While we were eating dinner. While he was eating a big steak.

It's not like I think he's going to keel over. He's very fit and usually keeps a semi-vegetarian diet (which made my bringing it up while he was eating steak all the more jarring), but he has, as they say, "risk factors." He probably didn't appreciate the reminder that he's nearing middle age, either. He countered that he was more likely to meet his maker in some freak home accident, like electrocution while installing a ceiling fan.

It's probably true; he's a bit of a kamikaze carpenter.

Administrators are people, too!

I was talking to my friend, a high school teacher, recently. We hadn't talked in quite a long time, and I was catching him up on things. I mentioned that, even though college staff doesn't get spring break off the way students and faculty do, a lot of us take vacation then. And even though I just recently spent a lovely week in Utah, I was still kind of feeling burned out and looking forward to my three-day Easter weekend.

"When exactly does the burnout stop?" my friend asked somewhat rhetorically. I think in corporate jobs, there's really never any chance to catch up with yourself. Maybe the holidays, but they bring a whole separate set of exhausting demands. But when you work at a school, no matter what the job description, the promise of summer keeps its spell on you.

Administrators may come to the office all summer, but we relax a little while everyone's away. We don't wear as many suits, and sometimes we take long lunches or go on vacation for weeks at a time. The phone doesn't ring as much, the halls are eerily quiet and, best of all, there are tons of parking spaces near our offices. Just like everyone else on campus, we're waiting out the schoolyear with an eye on summer vacation.

I like being an educational office drone. Even the illusion of summer vacation is better than what you get at a corporate job.

A spring wind

Just 40 more minutes and I can go home.

There's some serious spring fever on campus today. It's been windy as March can be all week, but today the chill softened and the breeze is gentle. I opened my 80-year-old windows (with the not-so-charming draft between leaded panes in the winter) and they're sliding around on their metal tracks. The wind has pushed them as far open as they can go and I expect papers to start flying off my desk and into the quadrangle any second.

But, the sight is really gorgeous. My humble office has one of the best views on campus, including the new tower gothic tower (which is modestly sized; politics dictated it could not be as large as the older, original gothic tower).

Just 35 minutes and I can go home.

My student worker didn't show up today and didn't call, which is somewhat uncharacteristic. He occasionally doesn't show up, but always calls or emails with a politely plausible excuse. I'm guessing he has a wicked hangover from celebrating his namesake (or "feast day," as they say in Spain) last night.

The last parking space in the world

I got pretty much the last parking space in the world today, at the edge of the universe...er...campus. Of course, it lies in the exact opposite corner of campus from my office. Of course, it's also about to start raining and I left my umbrella in the car.

That's March for you. It's possible Eliot got it wrong, and March is indeed the cruelest month. According to some of the old-timers around here, February and March are the months when everyone on campus is in the worst mood because it's been raining for the last two/three months, and everyone is sick of school and each other. Some Marches are wonderful and mild. Last Saturday, it was 80 degrees, but the past few it's been about half of that.

In a totally unrelated matter, remember this remedy. If you ever get horrible stress-induced (or weak-immune-system-induced, which I guess can be the same thing) mouth ulcers, the miracle cure is to swish 'n' spit with an unholy mixture of one part Children's Liquid Benadryl and one part Mylanta. These days, you can even get them both in cherry flavor so the taste isn't discordant.

We learned this trick from my mom's oncologist when she was undergoing chemo. Among the many infuriating indignities chemo patients must suffer (as if losing your hair and your white blood cells weren't enough) is a tendency toward thrush and horrible mouth ulcers. The human mouth is a funhouse of food particles and bacteria ready to throw a raging kegger on your sensitive gums.

But the Bena-lanta cocktail really knocks that shit out. The first time mom tried it, our only flavor choices were grape Benadryl and lemon Mylanta. Talk about unholy. Oh, and be warned that your tongue will go tingly numb for a while. Do not be alarmed. Two doses of the treatment, and you'll see a major improvement, guaranteed.

Who says cancer can't teach you a thing or two, though I'd rather have learned it any other way.

The phantom alarm and other gripes

One of my favorite things in the world is when I email someone (be it tech support for a vendor, or one of my colleagues) with a request and get a response back in indecipherable technobabble. Yep, I just love that. Today, for instance, after several months, I finally sort of learned what "sync-i-wam" is, and that it's not pronounced "sink-ee-wham." But when you open a window, you close a door and in response to another question I received (from a different person) advice to log in to a server the "same way you do any other." But of course, I don't do to any others, so I'm back at square zero.

For at least a week now, I've been awakened every morning at 6 am (a good 45 minutes before I normally wake on weekdays, and let's not even talk about weekends) by a beeping alarm emanating from some corner of my bedroom. I thought it was my watch, whose oversized nodules get randomly pressed by my shirt cuffs, causing all sorts of lights and chimes to activate. I've gotten up several times to rifle through drawers during the 30 seconds the alarm sounds, but could find no culprit (and it wasn't my watch). Finally, last night I decided it must be the clock on my desk. It has one of those mutant third arms on the clock face that determines (in a very inexact manner, unless you want it on the hour) the alarm time, so there's no way to set it to 00:00. And even though I hadn't touched it EVER, it appears to just have started sounding every morning. As far as I know, jiggling the switch (which was already in the "off" position) seems to have fixed it, unless I slept unusually hard this morning.

And that was my exciting day.

Better living through Fiestaware

So, I've mentioned that the really significant project at work right now is shopping for a new CMS to power the web site. It's a commitment of hundreds of thousands of dollars, when you really get down to figuring not just software and yearly maintenance fees, but also the price of implementing it, which means we'll basically be starting over from scratch.

Meanwhile, in a similarly huge personal commitment, I am in the process of buying a house. Given the enormity of this investment, it's not surprising I've approached the whole experience much as I do a project at work-moving things along, setting goals and deadlines, really getting serious when it was time to get to business. Lucky for me, the choice in house looks more solid than in CMS (because as several people have already pointed out, there's no perfect CMS; you settle with any one and usually commit to a lot of customization).

The thing about it is, when you enter Significant Decision Mode, even the minor choices start to look like the struggle of ages. Remember Fight Club, when the narrator laments the loss of his Ikea couch? “You buy a couch and you think 'that's done, I'll never have to buy another couch.'” Obviously, that line stayed with me because I haven't seen that movie in a couple years (a lot of that movie stayed with me, and not just because Dirty Brad Pitt--as opposed to the less desirable Clean Brad Pitt--was in it). I feel that way about the couch I've almost picked out, as well as the dishes. All of these objects have begun to play into my self-concept more than I'd like to admit.

I've had dishes before, and I got tired of them fast. I was relieved when my mother took them off my hands because she wanted them for my parents' vacation home. (Interestingly, she just confessed that she's now tired of them too. Don't know if it's just that particular pattern, which is inoffensive enough.) So buying dishes promised to be a monumental, teeth-gnashing decision, which I avoided by sticking to a promise I made myself long ago-the promise of Fiestaware.

I don't even know how long ago I decided I would one day own Fiestaware. Probably some time during college, and long enough to have forgotten it until I was in the store with Mom Saturday, and suddenly faced with the crisis of a sale. The sale was so big it required a snap decision on a big commitment. Think of how much time you spend looking at your dishes-eating, washing, drying, putting them away. They'll be my partner when I entertain guests, more reliable at this point than any boyfriend. And just as I secretly feel a thrill of dread at the thought of a boyfriend, much less a husband, how could I pick just one pattern of dishes?

The answer: Fiestaware-a higher level of china, where matching is based on symmetry and shape, rather than color. This is a noble order that appeals to the concept of plateness, or mugness, or bowlness rather than mere surface treatment. You break a mug and buy another in a different color, and it still matches. The more discordant the shades you combine on the table, the better. It's kooky, crazy and fun! You never have to worry about your pattern being discontinued because Fiestaware will outlive us all. Just watch out for the radioactive vintage red set (Cadmium, as Shinybottlecap has kindly warned me).

I picked out two sets of orange and two sets of leaf green, congratulating myself on a solid investment. I felt the satisfaction, even the peace of mind, one might feel buying life insurance. I may not have life insurance, but I have determined the course of my kitchen for years to come with Fiestaware.

The lament of a Sunday night

Who among us hasn't regularly felt the sense of chagrine that a Sunday evening brings? Even in my year as a freelancer, with too few cares to my name, Sunday night inspired that sense of dread you try to ignore. But no matter how you dress it up, you can't deny the party's over. Monday morning is inevitable, and it will come too soon.

Things I didn't do this weekend that I had wanted to do (or told someone I would do):
1. Drop off the baby shower gift I bought no less than 3 weeks ago, for the baby shower I missed last weekend (not my fault--out of town).
2. Begin knitting the "self-fringing shawl" pattern I picked up in Little Rock last month.
3. Call Joanna.
4. Read various work-related articles.
5. Get a haircut.
6. Write a get-well note to a sick friend.
7. Teach my mother "how to email electronic photos" (because I don't really know how to use iPhoto, so not entirely my slacker fault).
8. Exercise enough to balance out the obnoxious quantity of calories I consumed.

Things I did do (which should balance out my sense of defeat over the things I didn't do):
1. Identify a viable sofa for my new house (powder blue, microfiber/fake suede love seat--very Moderne).
2. Enjoy a live performance by the Quebcois-Celtic band Rosheen.
3. Eat crepes, including one wrapped around a Klondike bar (shared with two other people, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds).
4. Dig out the old art history texts and read about Robert Smithson and the Spiral Jetty (more about this another time).
5. Attend a party that was quite enjoyable and make conversation with new, interesting people, leading me to reevaluate my concept of myself as a social retard who can't deal with new people.
6. Sleep a lot (but never enough).
7. Talk to an almost-long-lost friend.
8. Spend quality time with my parents, whom I haven't seen in 2 1/2 months.

So, all in all, nothing to be too distraught over. Plus, Easter is coming up and I get a 3-day weekend. Woohoo!

Lunch, interrupted

I'm slightly hesitant to bring this up b/c I'm still paranoid about the world's stage that is the blogosphere, but there are maybe four people tops reading this, so it's probably ok.

I went to lunch at the Indian buffet yesterday. It's just so good, and it was my first day back to work so I needed a decadent treat (since I didn't have enough decadence in Utah, where I stuffed myself with ethnic foods to the point of horrible gastric distress). Desfortunadamente, or unfortunately, I was approached in the buffet line by a 50-ish man who would. not. stop. talking.

He was not what I would classify as truly disturbed; in fact, I think he was just manically high on his own ego. I had encountered him a few years ago at the same restaurant, where he'd sat at the next table and butted into a conversation I was having. He is some sort of physiologist at a local institution, a fact he made known immediately, along with his excellent medical/educational credentials and the fact that he'd scored incredibly high on his MCATs. Again, he was in his 50s. My friends can vouch that, since my early 20s, I have rarely made reference to my academic achievements except on resumes.

This dude just would not let up. He came over to my table twice to ask techy questions (once he found out my line of work) and even to ask if his teenage son could contact me to talk about creative careers and my line of work. I was stupid enough to give him my card. The thing is, he may be an egomaniac, but not a stalker. It's too much about him to ever involve anyone else, whereas stalkers are consumed by their object. Stalkers obsess about "me" and "what I want" because they want to fill a void they perceive in themselves. My lunch friend, on the other hand, was perfectly self-satified.

Here's the punchline. He has a web site, which I will not link here. Try googling power posture, and you'll find him. His appeal to visitors to read the home page if not the entire site (and, having just read a book on web usability, I can say with authority that there's more text on the home page alone than the vast majority of visitors would ever read) is classic Lunch Interrupter.

Is it any surprise that today I opted for a take-out sandwich from Quik-Chek?

Home again, home again, jiggity-jig

Day two back at work after a week's vacation. The transition has been remarkably easy. Normally, the return to work after being off for a while is marked by a dour mood, but the college is on spring break this week, so it's nobody here but us (staff) chickens. It's work-lite, and it's already Friday!

Also, I picked a great time to be out. The first day I was gone, the web site experienced serious problems that stretched into an ordeal of several days. Not to bore everyone with geektalk, but basically, someone changed/moved some files around, which caused our CMS to choke. The changes were fairly substantial, but they certainly shouldn't have killed the CMS, whose product name we shall not utter. Also, since the person was working with our "expert" consultants, you'd think someone might have foreseen the catastrophe. This kind of event, far too frequent, is why we're about to begin the arduous task of moving to yet another CMS. Oh well, all in a day's work. My co-workers were very glad when I returned.

Just a wee airplane

My boss would appreciate the humor of my flights to Salt Lake City this morning. Just yesterday, we were comparing flights to our varied destinations (he travels so much for work he needs his own "Bob on Tour" tshirts with the dates and cities). I rather boastfully declared that I never take commuter flights on small planes b/c it's part of my pact with myself to avoid dying as long as possible. He said he takes the tiny jets all the time, but he was concerned that the equipment description for his flight today was "Saab." Brings to mind a coup with wings.

So, of course when I prepare to board this morning, I am surprised when the back of the plane is prompted to board from "rows 7 and higher." I look out the window, and there's a tiny jet. I considered momentarily that I could not go, but the feeling wasn't overly strong. Halfway through the first flight, after some deep breathing and a little praying, I concluded, "a jet is a jet is a jet." Still, I felt a little uneasy and relieved to reach Salt Lake. Looks like the flights home are on more substantial planes.

Tulsa was flat--even flatter than Arkansas! I was surprised, also, to see such a small airport outside of the South, but I guess there are no boundaries for those. Utah is shockingly beautiful, as expected.

Read an interesting book on the plane: Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. "The industry standard" in web usability. More about this later.

Hello out there, Joanna!

And thank you for stopping by. I hope you find this blog a comfy, if spotty, place. Also, thank you for the SECOND g-mail invitation (since I let the first expire in my wishiwashiness over choosing a username). I'm all set up now, and wondering how to fit it into my daily email routine. I know a lot of people, like Tammitopia, juggle four or five accounts flawlessly, but I've always only had "work" and "home," and sometimes just "home" (and also one of those "email for life" forwarding things, which I should use but never do).

Some considerations:

• Should I give only the special people my g-mail account?
• Or should I use it as the spam magnet that I open out to the WWW?
• If I give the special people the g-mail account, what purpose would the home account serve, since they're the main ones who write me (them and Amazon).
• I'll be moving soon and may switch my services, so maybe I should make the transition to g-mail now and just keep it.

This is the email equivalent of agoraphobia. I prefer to keep things simple, and when I was looking for a house I quickly realized that, resale value be damned, I didn't want a bunch of extra space I didn't need. No den, please! Considering my current furniture inventory (bedroom set, desk, bookcase and tiny table with two chairs), even an eat-in kitchen is a little daunting. Clearly, I'll have some vacant rooms for a while, but I know the purpose of each. Too much space dillutes your focus; I'd spend all my time wandering from room to room, asking myself what is the point?

Anyway. The day is moving along quickly toward tomorrow morning's flight to Utah. Many things have been accomplished, and many more need to be.

The thumbless man and other childhood memories

One of my coworkers grew up in the same neighborhood as I did, around the same time. The area is nice, but it happens to be near one of the seedier thoroughfares in town. The street was originally one of the major highways through the city and it still has remnants of 40s and 50s roadside architecture--swooping neon signs, an abundance of glass block, gas stations whose Mod design Starbucks tries to emulate in its free-standing 'burban stores these days.

It's amazing, the things my coworker and I can conjure up from the glory days of Summer Avenue. There was the Dolly Madison factory with the big Snoopy on top. (Building still there, but Snoopy got blown away in a big storm in the 80s. No longer DM factory, either) Dottie's Shoes (now home to my favorite Mexican diner), a local forerunner to Payless, which had an inordinate number of clear-plastic high heels. The first-ever Holiday Inn, razed in the 90s and replaced with a funeral home. Skateland, a rink that had been declining since the 70s, but with a cool neon sign of a white-booted roller skate with wings--its tagline, "Skate for good health." The Imperial Lanes bowling alley where smoking is still very much allowed; all the employees stand around the front desk puffing away. It's also the scene of a yearly bowling party for my office, which originated from my boss's kitschy in-joke with himself.

And let us not forget, next to Lanes, the stately Admiral Benbow Inn, scene of several televised ("breaking news!") dramas and many more quiet ones.

Most of these places are gone or changed forever now. Except for Dottie's Shoes (since I'm addicted to the restaurant that now stands there), I don't think about them more than once every few years. It takes a fellow-rememberer to bring them back into existence for just a few moments.

Shabby, mundane spots like this would be overlooked completely if it weren't for childhood memory. Most adults would consider Skateland an eyesore and probably forget about it forever. Goodness knows I don't have the time to notice most of the quirks that pass my windshield every day. When I was five or six, I spent an early morning in the airport in Guam eying a thumbless man. The stop was a routine thing b/c we'd fly to see my family on the other side of the world every summer. The Guam airport was tiny. In fact, I remember only one small room. Did we take a jumbo jet (the kind with the 2nd floor cocktail lounge accessed by spiral stairs) to Guam? All I remember is watching dawn light filter through navy blue, streaky clouds, and talking to a man who was missing part of his thumb. I pretended not to stare, but took long looks when I thought he wasn't watching. I think I finally did ask him how he'd lost it, and he willingly told me. I've forgotten his story, too.

A lakeful of tomato soup

So, I'm going to Salt Lake City, UT, Thursday to visit one of my close friends from college. No, she's not mormon--her religion is skiing. She lived in Park City for a number of years, then ended up in grad school in SLC. Funny how we don't realize the hold a city has on us until it's too late. Many of my friends dream of moving elsewhere (I've frequently considered leaving TN, and did for a while) but it's not usually that simple. Some of us are held in place by family, or memory, or inertia. Once you're even moderately established in a career, it takes an awfully strong force of will to make all the changes necessary to get up and move unless there's a compelling reason. Of course, some of my friends have made pretty impressive moves the last few years, cross-country and cross-ocean.

Anyway. The last week and a half has been completely consumed with suddenly and unexpectedly buying a house (had planned to wait another couple of months), so I haven't even had time to get excited about my spring break jaunt to SLC. I'm hoping to go see the Spiral Jetty, a several-hours drive, but worth it to visit the "non-site" of earth art I studied in college. The jetty was covered over with water for years, but emerged when the red waters of the GSL receded a few years ago.