Sigh

Apparently, Pandora can magically sense my mood tonight: 'Oblivion' by Bastille, 'Your Bones' by Of Monsters and Men, and 'Lifeline' by Mat Kearney, have all played in the last few minutes. My mom, the library, even the children's book programme--all going away, evaporating, leaving my life. It's really starting to hit me. Ten more workdays left till the end. Then I show up on the 31st, sign my paperwork, and that's it. Tomorrow will be my 20th year at work. And while I wouldn't trade it for anything, its ending makes me more than a little sad.

A good day

Today was pretty decent. Unlike Friday, when I overslept and ran out of the door without bothering to even comb my hair (I noticed in the rearview mirror on the way, at least), I was up a little early, got to work right on time, and had a busy and fairly productive day, which was pretty decent considering I spent most of the weekend over at a friend's helping him cook and cleaning his house. I got to eat some of what we cooked last night, and it was great. The butternut squash which I'd groused about because I hate peeling winter squash, and there were five of them, was wonderful, with sauteed garlic and onions mixed in. There was escarole surprise soup--the surprise being that it was actually spinach, as the store didn't have escarole. :) I went over after work today to finish the floors (I'd put off mopping since I figured I'd get potato skins on the floor anyway, as yesterday was a potato broccoli cheddar casserole.) But he was expecting company, and I'd forgotten, so I took my groceries (I'd stopped by to get a decent container for soup, and got a few things for dinner), and came home--which works out perfectly, because I have to 1) finish a book review for The Journal of Hospital Librarianship that's due today and 2) I need to at least do the dishes (yes, I didn't manage that Sunday), and I plan to work on the kitchen and the bathroom. Because I was bringing in groceries, the first thing I did upon getting home was clean out the refrigerator and put it in order. I found some Greek Gods yoghurt at Kroger that I'd tried, it was a new flavour--chocolate cherry--and there was some marked down. I also got salad makings and the spring mix with herbs was marked down. Oh, and sourdough bread, the Goldminer's brand I like, was in the bargain area, so I got it and I had some for dinner with havarti cheese and dressing.

I also want to sit down and do some reading about hoarding, and prepare for my next session (which isn't until the 11th, but hey, it's something that I need to do). I fixed the notebook yesterday, of course, with tabs for each chapter. But I haven't really read through any of it yet; I've just taken the assessment.

One of my co-workers showed me the 'Saturday Night Live' sketch with Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump. He did such a good job. I really enjoyed it. You should watch it.

Okay, I've got Pandora on, the Bastille channel, and I'm going to work on the kitchen. I think I'll switch from the TV to my headphones and phone, so I can move about. I'll probably write later.

Making bread

with the last of my regular bread flour, and the oats and yeast are getting low. So no more bread, most likely, until next Wednesday night late or Thursday. That makes me a little sad.

The potatoes and beans made an excellent lunch today, and I finished up the last of them for dinner. Tomorrow the plan is to take eggs for breakfast, a tuna pouch and the bread for lunch, and eat on that.

This morning even my blood was sluggish--it took them three tries to do a blood draw, and it finally worked in my hand. I didn't get to work until 9:40 because of that, so I stayed a little late at work. I'm going to try to go in early tomorrow to make up some time. Generally, this pay period, I've done very well. I won't have to use PTO for anything last week, and if I can go in an hour early tomorrow, I may have to just a half hour of PTO. Yay! I did ask if my followup appointment, which is the 30th (my doctor always does a blood draw and then has me come back a couple of weeks later) would let out before 11, as I have a library committee meeting then. The office manager assured me that I would, as I'd be the first appointment of the day. Let's hope so. It also works out that I won't have a blood draw that day, as I'll be giving blood at our workplace blood drive later that day.

After work I went over to a friend's house and took him to the store. The only ingredient that eluded us at the three grocery stores we tried was hazelnut oil. He's going to try to work around it.

Usually when I apply for a job, I just include the related work history (most likely library-related, although I include my comic book store experience because I did everything a librarian does (ordering serials for vendors, putting clients and books into databases, processing and placing books on shelves, and customer service, to name a few), and because everyone should have something a little unusual on their application that makes them stand out a bit, as one of my co-workers has pointed out to me. Hers was teaching English for a year in Martinique, which is cooler than a year at a comic store, but hey, I included what I had to work with.

But since I was considering applying at the grocery store, I wrote up a listing, with dates, of ALL my work experience, from my first job down to my current job. In 32 years I have held 18 jobs. mostly part-time. (I just realised I forgot two--I'd only listed 16 on the paper), and they lasted at a minimum 3 months and at the most 19 years (the latter is current, and slated to end next year, at 20 years). I've had up to three jobs at a time, and I didn't work full-time for any one company till 2010, when I was 43, and even then, it's at two jobs within the hospital. I have been:

1. A docent at a historical home/museum.
2. An interfiler (the person who used to put catalogue cards in their proper place in the card catalogue).
3. An office clerk for a medical school, which mostly entailed shredding old applications.
4. A food service worker at a variety of sites on the University's campus.
5. An archives assistant who ironed and prepared newspapers for microfilming.
6. A deli clerk at a grocery.
7. A cashier at a grocery.
8. A stock clerk at a large toy store.
9. A telephone surveyor doing research for the university.
10. An intern at the state archive processing and providing access to three years' worth of state publications.
11. A graduate assistant doing original and copy cataloguing and providing authority control in the integrated library system.
12. A clerk at a bagel company.
13. The assistant manager of a comic store.
14. A medical librarian in a hospital (current job).
15. A cataloguer for a vendor who provided children and teen books to public libraries.
16. A teacher's assistant designing lesson plans on the web and doing education-related research for a public television station.
17. A clerk at a gas station.
18. A data entry clerk for revenue cycle charges, charge reconciliation, audits, and obtaining referrals from primary care providers (current job)

So it has been varied over the years. Most of them involved working with people and customer service.

I'm getting sleepy, so I don't want to apply tonight. But I have the information I need and will try to tomorrow night, depending on what I wind up needing to do after work. In the meantime there's the bread, and I'm listening to Bastille, which I haven't in awhile. I set my alarm clock up again (I usually use different applications on my cell phone). One nice thing about my clock is that I can take a male to male audio cable and plug it into the clock, and then to the earphone jack of the phone, and then I can play music through an auxiliary setting. But every time I set the clock (and it took three tries), it would jump ahead because it thinks it needs to for daylight savings time. :( I finally got it taken care of, though. I also pulled three batteries out of my telescope and put it into the clock as a backup.

Okay, I think I'm going to go now. I've decided not to check the news tonight; it's too depressing. It was awful about the assassination of the Member of Parliament, Jo Cox, over in Britain today. She was a tireless campaigner for the disadvantaged, had worked for non-profits to better the world. She was a supporter of aiding Syrian refugees. I keep trying to remind myself that the good people in the world really do outnumber the bad. But it's getting harder. Unfortunately, in this case, it was the good person, it seems, who died. And I feel so sorry for her husband and her children, the latter of which are only three and five, according to Wikipedia. I am going to go over to Facebook and catch up, since there was an outage earlier. Maybe I'll find something heartwarming there.

Anyway, hope you have a good night!

Listening to:

Bastille, Bad Blood

Well, it's been a fairly pleasant and productive day, I'd say. This morning it was nice weather, not too hot, and although I can't say for sure this afternoon, as I was inside, at least it was sunny, after so much rain of late.

I'd thought about watching something on Netflix now that I've finished my other activities, but I decided instead to listen to some music, my Bastille CD. I have 1,628 songs on my phone, either ripped from CDs I own, bought as .mp3s, gotten from the Lexington Public Library through the Freegal Music service (which allows you to download three songs a week to keep from their collection), or gotten as .mp3s in addition to CDs via AutoRip through Amazon. The nice thing about getting music through Amazon is that although you can play them through the Amazon music application, or store them on their cloud service, you can also just move them to a music folder, and play however you like. I'm not sure you can do that with iTunes music. I always gathered you had to do everything through iTunes. But I might be wrong; I don't know much about Apple, to be honest. People constantly bring me iPhones to figure out, and usually I can figure out the problem (usually with their settings), but I'm much better with Amazon. One thing I learned early about the Freegal Music, though, is to move it to my SD card shortly after downloading it, because if there's a factory reset or something (I had to do that at some point due to a problem with getting into my phone when I was using the fingerprint scanner), you lose everything on your phone. I keep all my music and photos on the SD card for this reason. Which reminds me...

Dear Samsung,

I read with interest the other day that your sales of the Galaxy S6 were disappointing. Perhaps it is because you have misunderstood those who buy your phones. You sacrificed usability majorly for form, trying to make things more like an iPhone. I bought your phones because, among other things, they had removable batteries, expandable memory, etc. As much as I complained about the little flap door on my charging port on the S5, I appreciated that I could drop it in snow or even water and it would live. But you took all that away to make your new phones 'prettier'. I like the form of the S6 Edge but will not buy one, even though my plan allows me to upgrade, because 1) You took aways some of the most useful things about the phone, and 2) I would have to buy a more expensive, larger storage model to duplicate my otherwise cheap SD card, which I think cost me less than $20 and gives me 32GB of space, of which I've filled about 11GB already, in addition to about three quarters of the phone storage in applications and such. And if I did have to factory reset, I'd lose everything and have to back it up on the computer or such instead, and reload everything, which is a pain. I don't care if my phone is made out of gorilla glass or plastic. If I wanted something more like the iPhone, I'd get one. I don't like iPhones; I prefer the customisablity of Android and all the different things I can do with an Android phone that iPhone users are just now getting with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. And what I care about is that it is durable, usable, and does what I need it to do. So I'll pass on the S6, or even the S6 Edge, and hopefully by the S7 you'll see the error of your ways, or I may just keep my S5 for awhile and shop around for a new phone manufacturer. So there you go, in case you haven't figured it out yet. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way, hence the lagging sales. Consider your next design carefully (but keeping the curved edges may be a plus. :) )

What can I say, I am a Windows, Android, Google, and Amazon kind of girl. :) I like to tinker with things, not have them delivered to me in a a nice little package I can't do anything with except consume through some sort of monolithic operation. Just saying....

Okay, I've gathered up my laundry for tomorrow, gotten into comfy clothes, wrapped up the bread, and I'm ready to turn in. Good night; I hope your weekend is going well. Good night.

Listening to:

Good night.

Listening to

A happy thing

So, I'm looking at my calendar on my phone and am struck by the fact that for the first time in weeks--perhaps months--neither I nor a friend of mind whom I drive to commitments have any sort of appointments at all this week. Yay!

Today was good; A and I cleaned house in preparation for the game, then Brenda came over and we played Call of Cthulhu and visited. I normally stay for 'Witches of East End', but I didn't really sleep that well last night and I was pretty tired, so I came on home. YKWIA is recording it on his DVR, so hopefully I can watch it later. So now I'm comfy and listening to some music (Bastille's 'Icarus') and thinking about going on to bed even though it's not yet 10 pm.

Tomorrow I plan on:

1. Getting some things accomplished at work
2. Paying some bills
3. Calling several doctor's offices that owe me co-pays because I met my out-of-pocket max months ago
4. Working on the house
5. Watching the season 8 premiere of 'The Big Bang Theory'
6. Celebrating the autumnal equinox (10:29 PM local time (EDT))

I'm not sure yet if I'll go over to my friends' house or not tomorrow. I really need to work on the house some more. I'd like to get it in order before dark of the moon, which is in a couple of days. I didn't do my monthly libation last time, and I'd like to do so at dark of the moon (which is traditional) and purify the house, which should be clean first.

If I do go over there, I have the ingredients for more squash and couscous, and I'm going to alter the original recipe by adding garlic (it was a little bland as it was written--YKWIA, an excellent cook, suggested the garlic). Also, I managed to find some fresh basil, so I can use that instead of dried, which should help the flavour. But if not, I think everything will still be okay Tuesday, which may be better because A has a meeting on Monday nights, so we'd be eating fairly late if I do it then.

I really pigged out at the game today, eating quite a bit of cheese and some fruit, and a few crackers, plus a sandwich. But as of this morning I was 18 lbs down from my maximum weight, so that's good. Hopefully today won't reverse that trend. I tend to graze on Sundays rather than eating meals.

Okay, I really think I'm going to go on to bed. Good night.

It has been a busy, busy day

And I am quite glad to be able to prop my feet up and relax to Bastille's album, Bad Blood. Today I have:

1. Brushed a very fluffy dog who's throwing her coat.
2. Taken a friend to the pharmacy.
3. Taken a friend to the grocery.
4. Helped a couple of friends clean out and organise their shed.
5. Got bitten by mosquitoes and short of breath from dust and mildew.
6. Gone to get a take-out dinner with a friend.
7. Watched an episode of 'Haven' with a friend.
8. Watched an episode of 'Warehouse 13' with a friend.
9. Choked on a bit of ice and soda that went down the wrong way.
10. Watched the newest 'Doctor Who' episode with a friend.
11. Charged my laptop for tomorrow (but the notes are finished!)

Tomorrow there's:

1. Going to get stuff to gnosh on during the game.
2. Game prep/housework
3. Call of Cthulhu game.
4. Dose the dogs with flea medicine.
5. Change some indoor floodlights.
6. Watch 'Witches of East End'.

So yeah, I'm a bit pooped. It's nearly midnight; I think I'll head on to bed. Goodnight.

Mad for British accents

As you may have guessed, I'm an avowed Anglophile, my chief failure at which is my dislike of tea. So today a man called me from Eduserv, which runs the identity/access management feature Athens that you see on so many electronic resource web sites. They're based in Britain. Even though I have no budget for such things and the whole library, including myself, is going to be scrapped in a couple of years when the hospital transitions to an ambulatory care model, I must confess letting him run on a bit before informing of him of this because, frankly, I adored his accent. I wonder if they've found Americans will buy just about anything from a Brit if the accent's right? I know it frustrated YKWIA to no end at aforementioned pagan gathering that certain authors with British accents would have the crowd nodding and smiling in agreement and placated into some sort of sense of truth even though the gist of their talks were pure hogwash. Anyway, I'm feeling a tiny bit guilty I didn't cut him off earlier, but I did eventually fess up and while he was disappointed not to be able to do a demo, I think he appreciated my candor. And I let him run on with his spiel for just a tiny bit. :) Most vendor calls never get that far. Then I put my headphones back on and continued listening to the BΔSTILLE album 'Bad Blood', which are, of course, a British band. :)