Whew! What a BUSY couple of days!

: 'Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)' by Green Day; 'Man on the Moon' by REM; 'Bright Lights' by Matchbox Twenty
: Accomplished

Yesterday I put in a very long day working at both places and finally getting some concrete progress on my project for KET. Adventure of the day: The bus power chair lift (for bringing wheelchairs on board) broke free when the lever refused to hold and was bolting forward into the door, causing us to be stranded until they could fix it. (Fortunately one of the new expresses came by and I realised it would get me to Cooper, so I grabbed that one instead). [You know, I don't mind taxes. But living in a town where we can't get public transportation that runs reliably and safely and where we're losing dozens of police and fire fighters due to lack of pay makes me wonder where my tax dollars ARE going....] But I still managed to get to work when I said I would be there and got my time sheet in, so I should be getting my first paycheque from there next week.

I also checked out classes for next semester (I want to finish up my graduate studies and that annoying one linguistics undergraduate class in the next year or so). I'm thinking of taking 'Women and Madness' and 'Readings in US Women's History'. I need to talk to a history advisor and the women's studies department about the certificate in Women's Studies and finishing up my history degree. I took a couple years off to get my health together, and I'm afraid I might have to get special permission, since there's a time limit involved. We'll see. But since by my calculation I'm only about a year's worth of work away from a PhD I think I should go for it.

Today I started out my day exercising my Nineteenth Amendment right (as one of my fellow bus riders put it) and discovered that the universe had a sick joke to play on me. Or maybe it's just not in favour of the democratic process. Basically, I got over to the polling place and discovered that the election official who was signing people in was my ex. We both basically pretended that we'd never set eyes on each other. Since I once swore I'd have nothing more to do with him, I made a general non-committal sound when asked whether I was still at the same address. Basically if he didn't know where I lived already, he does now. Not that this bothers me as much as it once would--but we do live only a block away from one another. Gee. My life. Fortunately once I got in the booth I could do my silent screaming. Still, I managed to vote and get out of there with a fair amount of grace.

My only consolation was that I was apparently quite stunning. No, I'm not being vain. Because that spur-of-the-moment rinse has made my hair a little brighter than normal, I've been making sure my skintone didn't clash by wearing my contacts and makeup and this is flooring everyone I run into. I found some of that lipstick that lasts all day on sale, so I'm wearing lipstick for longer than five minutes and apparently it makes a huge difference. I have had random guys hit on me. My co-workers have all gone 'wow!'...that sort of thing. My glasses are so strong in prescription they make my eyes look a lot smaller, and I guess it had been awhile since anyone had seen my (as one friend puts it 'lemur') eyes. The compliments have been nice. I guess I'd been hiding behind those glasses for too long. It's also nice to know that all that theoretical knowledge I gained from Seventeen magazine worked...it's enough to get the compliments but no one's sure whether I have makeup on, so I'm doing it right. Makeup and manicures--two skills I got from that magazine. Pity it couldn't teach me to walk in heels. That's a girly thing that's beyond me, I think.

Today I spent most of my workday working on web stuff for the hospital and then, after getting my unemployment cheque in the mail, went out to hunt the elusive dog and cat food at the grocery and drag it back home. With the bus, this took four hours, mostly in waiting. Mind you, it's maybe a mile down the road. Unfortunately, between people rushing to vote (a good thing, I guess) and those rushing to get to the UK basketball game, traffic was bumper to bumper. When I started out it wasn't dark, but by the time I even got on the bus (I had to wait about an hour and 15 minutes because they don't have enough working buses to run the peak hour schedule) the sun had gone down. Not a good time to have worn black. But I managed to cross Richmond Road without getting killed, at least. And I discovered Schlotzsky's has good vegetarian fair (Tuscan Italian pizza very nummy). I also got to watch a very interesting crab spider that was yellow on the front and black on the rear. Okay, maybe some of you wouldn't see that as a plus, but I do. There was also a beautiful orb spider web up in a tree near the grocery. But spiders are a special fondness of mine, especially religiously, which is why my middle name means spider. :)

Now the animals are sated and I have some basic necessities in the house. Unfortunately, the system seems to have screwed up my cheque again--I only got $49. That's a week worth minus what I worked at KET the first week. The second week I didn't work both jobs (busy trying not to get evicted) and I was off for vacation for three days. Whenever I follow the &^*%% prompts on the system as its stated and try to enter vacation pay, it messes things up. I need to check tomorrow and see if I can get it hammered out. If so, then I should be able to get another $89 by the end of the week. Sigh. Don't get me wrong...I'm not complaining, because I know the phone claims are easier than it used to be. But it's still frustrating. At least two more jobs opened up at the university.

We have a new governor (not the one I voted for, but you can't win everything). I know someone who's been working for the Democratic ticket, and I'm sure he's disappointed. I must say Ernie Fletcher (the Republican candidate and winner) did an excellent job in his acceptance speech, and Ben Chandler (the Democratic candidate) seems to have taken things gracefully. I suppose the two pluses are 1) There will be a new election to fill Fletcher's now-vacant Congressional seat--dare we get a less conservative Congressman in?-- and 2) regardless of the outcome, Paul Patton is leaving office. Patton's legacy has unfortunately become one in which he not only had an affair but allegedly used his office for the benefit of his mistress. The scandal was such that Ben Chandler's chances were hurt just by sharing the same political party, despite an overall public approval of his job as Attorney General--a lot of people didn't realise he was elected to the office; they thought he was a Patton appointee, I think, since on the federal level it's an appointed office. We vote for ours separately. I have to admit, I very nearly voted for Gatewood Galbraith for the new AG. He's sort of perennial character that runs for just about everything around here. He's very much pro-marijuana. That seemed like almost too good to pass up in terms of irony. Although I do agree with some of Galbraith's ideas (he is an Independent, after all), he's a little too out there for me. And he smokes cigars. Not that I'll hold it against him politically--I just try to avoid him at the July 4th parades because I nearly puke whenever I smell cigars. :)

Hmm....anything else? How about Weird Dream of the Week?

The winner is the one I had Sunday night where the library (which I always dream about as if it were part of a school, with lots of exits and these double walls with storage between the walls, even though my library looks nothing like this and doesn't even have an outside door) was actually built atop an old monastery. In the area between the walls you could go down into this sort of catacomb that was part of the monastery. There was an interesting reliquary made of stone using some sort of artesian well or aquifer process to draw water up and then flow down steps, recycling the water and taking these two stone statues of saints down the steps with it. I remember thinking it was craftsmanship akin to the Coral Castle in Florida. (Actually, that's what the stone looked like--rough-hewn).

At some point they brought in enough student shelvers to literally shelve maybe 30 books a piece (hey, we've only got about 1000 books). They had a teacher who was a very arrogant man who, it turned out, was really there to try to get a secret artefact from the monastery. They wound up going down into the caverns and desecrated one of the holy areas. The abbot was chasing the teacher through these sand tunnels underground. Neither was acting particularly human, I might add. There was a thing that was the abbot's protector, a sort of Cthulhoid thing that was tripedal, with three eyes and tentacles--sort of pyramid-shaped, like some concepts of Lovecraft's Nyarlothotep, but the size of a man. It was very agitated and tried to keep up with the abbot to protect him.

Somewhere in all this there was bob-tailed mother cat I'd taken in which, when we returned from below, had become rabid and died. It's like the desecration caused everything to become poisoned and decayed. The cat upset me more than anything though. Eventually I was sent away to quiet retirement in an Italian villa--apparently the church takes care of their own--so I couldn't share the secret of the monastery. (Which is rather odd, seeing as I'm pagan).

Yeah. I know. I shouldn't play so much Call of Cthulhu. It was really like something out of Indiana Jones run amok.

Only drawback? I've been so busy, I haven't updated the NaNoWriMo project. But I have a whole month for that, right? Ha. That'll go by quickly. Well, I guess that's it for now. Hope you're having a good week.