You're Doing It Wrong

Yesterday I alternated between my grant writing stuff and the giant pile of weeds-soon-too-be-seeds in my backyard. I also read almost everything in my misc. reading pile which is magazines, articles and pamphlets that pile up.

Did I say I was taking a grant writing class? Tonight is class 2 and I’ve been going through the class materials and working on my practice grant. I now understand why it takes so long to write a grant. I don’t have actual data for my practice grant so I’m just working as if I did and even with making up data I barely made a dent in my statement of purpose and objectives and methodology.

Meanwhile, did you hear talk about another X-Files movie?

Don’t get me wrong. I loved X-Files. I’ve been tempted to go back and watch the first three seasons on DVD except I always have so many other shows to watch. I loved the first movie. I’m just wondering how many people like me even give a fart about X-Files these days.

I’m on my way out the door to class right now.

On Thursday night we had an amazing thunder storm. I was just getting into bed to read and all the windows were open. I heard some rumbling and got up to look out the bedroom window and saw a huge flash of light in the sky. I turned out the lights and watched for almost a half hour. I kept thinking, “One more good one, and then I’ll read my book.” Then I’d want to see more.

We don’t get many storms like that here. One of my neighbors had their window open and every time there was a big flash I could hear a big, “OOH!”

At the same time the sky opened up and it rained like crazy. Sadly I had spent a good amount of time watering everything thoroughly so it all got a double dose. I took last night off from watering and it’s hot today so I’m sure my garden is crying about now. I’ve got to get out there and photograph the pumpkins. I put pumpkins in the front this year as well as the back and the plants in the very front of the house are going gangbusters. There’s a pumpkin bigger than a softball sitting in the middle of a shrub. I hope no bad kids wander by and take it for entertainment purposes.

I’m taking a grant writing class and I’m going to do my homework now. I decided to make tomorrow a no computer day and free myself from this beast (that I love and want to sit at all day long).

Oof. Very busy week with lots of personal growth activities which I won’t go into details at this time.

This is the Klamath River at Dolan’s. Among my favorite spots to walk when I’m in Orleans.

Today’s commute (back at home, Portland to Vancouver) is our first entry in the worst cl*sterf#k summer commute day contest. 86 minutes from the time I left the parking garage to the time I pulled into the driveway. The drive is 11.5 miles so by my, understandably limited comprehension of math, that’s about a 7.5 minute mile. I run an 11 minute mile on a good day so I couldn’t have beat that on foot. But somewhere, someone could have. Even the carpool lane was backed up.

I have a class all day tomorrow and a goodly portion of my Saturday is booked as well.

Riveting posts will most likely few and far between. Go read a book, instead.

One of the things I like about my job is that I only do it at work. Once I leave the office I don’t think about work or worry or check-in or anything.

I’ve been holding my magical post vacation super-relaxed feeling right up until the moment when I sat down at my desk and saw the piles of stuff and notes I left myself for things that need to be taken care of this week. AGH!

So I have one quick story before I dig into it.

Our building was purchased and the management changed and they’ve been doing all sorts of renovations. Carpet and light fixtures were replaced and the walls painted and they’ve been replacing signs.

This morning I noticed a new sign in the hall. The regular “Men” sign is on one side of the men’s room door and on the other side of the door is a sign that says: Sprinkler Room.

While on vacation I read a 646 page book that I hated. The review is here (Book #15). I know, I’m an idiot. I should have put the book down but I didn’t know how much I hated it until I finished it and realized that I wasted precious vacation reading time on a stupid book.

Still haven’t gotten any projects done. Crap.

Dang. I had this photo saved especially to post for 4th of July and then got all in a hurry before I left and forgot about it. Vancouver has a giant fireworks display every year and people come from all over to hang out at the Fort for the day. There are vendors and music and all sorts of fun stuff. Sad to admit, I’ve lived here for 12 years now and I’ve never actually watched the display. You know, bright lights exploding in the sky and making a big boom, bazillions of people, babies, dogs. I don’t really need to do that.

But if we’re home, Bob and I like to take a walk down there during the day to checkout the scene and buy a corndog and have a whirl on The Zipper and find fun photos like the one above. Bob makes me stand and pretend like he’s taking my photo so instead he can take the picture of the guy in a red, white, and blue diaper, or whatever that is. (Totally just kidding about the corndog and Zipper, by the way. I feel like throwing up just thinking about corndogs and/or The Zipper separately.)

This year we both missed it because we weren’t in town. Oh well.

Last night I ran over to the local convenience mart to grab some beef jerky and diet Coke for dinner because we had nothing in the house and I was too tired to go to Safeway. I searched the giant racks of Funyuns and coolers filled with tall towers of frosty PBR in the hopes of finding another delicious treat to round out my meal. Instead I found a huge display with at least 40 different framed posters from Scarface available for purchase. What is that all about? (The part about jerky, Coke and Funyons for dinner is also a lie but sounds good, but the Scarface: totally true.)

I had a couple of major projects that I desperately wanted to get done today but so far other than doing a load of laundry and buying wine at Trader Joe’s I’ve been worthless. I’m going to make some more tea and see if I can get with it.

I’ll start with people who aren’t doing it wrong. The yummy deli in downtown Vancouver is called La Bottega and right this moment I am full with treats from their delicious lunch menu. (That website could use just a teeny bit of cleaning up. Maybe I can offer to trade for food!) It’s a deli, it’s a wine shop, it’s a sit down restaurant that was SRO today for lunch. We shared a grilled pesto salmon salad and a large serving of smoked mushroom ravioli and I picked up a couple pounds of ravioli to take when I visit my Mom and Dad. It’s located on Main in the old Hank’s Tavern.

So in the category of people are assholes item # 1430. On Wednesday as I took my yoga clothes out of the trunk I noticed that there was some peeling paint on the rear bumper. Remember back in April I took the car in and got all this body work taken care of and it was three different claims. Someone hit me, someone hit-and-run and I, uh, scraped something. I’m not obsessive but I like to take care of my things and the car was starting to feel like a dented tuna can so I finally took care of it and after all the deductibles and taxes and charges and extra charges, let’s just say it cost about the same as one paycheck on a bi-monthly payday schedule.

I drove by the bodyshop today to have them check out the peeling paint and turns out my car was hit again. He showed me where you can see on the bumper how something hit it hard enough to make the bumper (plastic) bend and crack the paint. Then I remember that when I pulled out on Wednesday, the car behind me (remember we have tandem parking) was a Hummer. Probably didn’t even feel hitting my car. Thanks guy! Or gal!

I hate to ignore it because what’s a small bit of peeling paint now is no doubt going to be a crap looking bumper three months from now. I asked the body shop if there was a temporary fix so it wouldn’t get worse. I know zero about car bodies but there must be some sort of something they could seal it with. If there is, there was nothing they were willing to do for me without a claim and an estimate. So there you go. I don’t want to spend any more money the bumper of a 2001 car with 75,000 miles on it.

Next item. My dear husband turned 50 in March and one of his relatives thought it would be funny to get him a membership in AARP. As a spouse, I’m a member, too. I’m still in the process of owning the whole middle age thing. I don’t want to be a member of a retired people club. Especially since the retired people club has been blitzing us with piles of unsolicited mail for insurance and crap like that.

I’m hardcore on not getting junk mail and catalogs and we get very little. This afternoon I decided to log into their webpage and drop them a note opting out of all these mailings. And of course there are only two ways you can contact AARP: mail and phone. Evolve or die, AARP!

So I phoned and here’s where they invested their technology dollars: a phonebot to answer the phone. Remember how much I loved the Sears phonebot? It was awful. It was like reading my request one letter at a time. I got tired of dicking around and pressed the magic zero and my bot said, “I’m sorry. You didn’t answer my question about what you had for lunch. If you had baloney and cheese, say: baloney and cheese.”

I screamed: “I want to talk to a person!” (I really did shriek very loud so imagine a cat in a blender type voice when you read the above.) And the bot said, “Would you like to speak to a customer service representative?” And I said “Yes!” and she said, “I’ll get someone to help us.” And that is not a typo or error, the robot said she’d get someone to help us.

Aside, and I wish I could find the URL, but recently I saw an article online said that often phonebots are programmed to recognize swear words so if you tell the phonebot to f-off, it will transfer you to a person.

Dimitri came on the line and was happy to help me out with my request and supposedly, that problem solved. So what you learned here is that if you don’t want to talk to a phonebot try screaming and swearing. The laugh you get when it works will diffuse your frustration.

Final item of the day. You know how there are stereotypical categories of certain types of cars and driving behavior? The aggro pick-up truck that can’t go less than 25 MPH over the posted limit who zooms up on your bumper and terrorizes you and giving you about three seconds to change lanes before swerving around you and then flipping you the bird like you’re the bad guy? Also the driver is a guy wearing a baseball cap. The pushy Subaru that absolutely has to get in front of you even if you’ve already let a car in or have to slam on your brakes but then gives you a wave like we’re all so friendly driven by a woman with bobbed hair and a Labrador in the back? The luxury sedan with the person on the cellphone drifting around in the lane and not aware of the concept of turn signals? I have a new one to add: the lame Prius driver. Hello! You aren’t going to save the planet by ignoring your accelerator. (It’s not getting any greener! ha!) Or hey, I’m giving you close to three car lengths, go ahead and change lanes. You’re safe. Jeez.