Working Girl

This has been quite a working week. In addition to my usual class schedule and momming about, I worked about 15 hours in the office at my uncle's store. Right now there's no set schedule to when I work, but at least it's hours and it's fun hanging out and working with my uncle. My sister also works for him sometimes and at points all three of us were in the office working together. We got a lot accomplished but we all got such a kick out of it that it hardly seemed like work at all.
It's a little surreal (and kind of a grind) to go straight from college teacher to file clerk in the span of a 12 mile drive, but it's nice to get down to Portsmouth even if all I really see is the big parking lot and the inside of the store. I like knowing that I'm in the store with my uncle and my dad and sister are across the parking lot working at my dad's office. It kind of makes me feel like Portsmouth is still my town and it's nice being even a small part of a family business.
There's still a ton of uncertainty about how I'm going to go about earning my living from here on out, but maybe just for now, just for the next month or so, I can be happy knowing that I've got it under control, at least for now.

Bubbling With Aloha

Are you looking to share a little Aloha spirit with a unique gift for someone? Well, you should check out what Kayla's Mama has to offer. Dianne, my friend and commarade in arms during grad school and a stint teaching in Japan, has launched a website for her new family-run business. Please take a visit. You may be able to find a great gift for your mom in time for Mother's Day. Mahalo.

Work It

Just a week or two ago I was driving myself crazy worrying about what I was going to do for work after the semester ends in mid-May. Now I suddenly have four different jobs to work in the next few weeks. Some of them are short term freelance assignments and another has more longterm possibilities. It may even turn out to be my next career. It's way too early to tell, but it's interesting to consider the possibility.

King Arthur Festival

Even though I haven't been feeling so great lately, I had promised my girl we would go to the King Arthur Festival at the Hammond Castle in Gloucester, so we went yesterday. The weather started out cool and rainy so we decided not to dress in costume. We both have decent outfits but no cloaks or capes and that would have been a necessity on a day with weather like yesterday.
The weather is probably what kept the Festival from being overcrowded. There was a good number of people in attendance, but not so many that we couldn't move around freely. We didn't get there until about 1pm, so we didn't really follow the day's storyline too closely. What we did see was very good and the characters are always interacting with the audience between their scenes anyway, so we got to chat a little with Hazel, the court's rat catcher and her rats, Queen Bellakane (I think it was), Morgan Le Fey-- an evil queen, Mordred and one of Morgan's servants. We toured the castle, which is really an impressive structure, and watched the Phoenix Swords fire show and the end of the Human Chess Match. The weather cleared up mid-afternoon and it turned into a really pleasant day.
The food offerings were limited to one vendor selling kettle corn and another selling fried dough, hot dogs, sausages and cheeseburgers. Nothing very medieval about those offerings, but the kettle corn was tasty. There was a decent variety of vendors selling clothing, jewelry, leather goods, chain maile, weapons, hats and other objects, as well as a woman doing henna body art and another pair of vendors offering massage and reiki. I managed to keep the financial damage fairly low, just buying up a skirt catcher for myself and couple of dragon related items for the girl. I looked at capes, but couldn't decide on one. The velvet ones are so pretty, but the wool ones are probably much warmer.
I would have liked to have taken more photos, but of course I forgot to charge the camera battery and ran out of power after taking just a dozen pictures. I have posted the ones that came out decently as a set on my Flickr account, of you're interested.

Making the Plan

It's been a rainy, dreary weekend so far and that's okay because I need the down time. I felt crappy all week and I'm pretty sure it's due to stress. The semester is going to be ending in a couple of weeks and that means the end of the university paycheck until classes start back up in the fall. I've been really worried about finding a job for the summer, but as fate would have it, my sister hooked me up with a couple of part time jobs that are at least a start in my quest for gainful summer employment.
I think next year is going to be my last year teaching at the university. The talk of the fulltime job that was being dangled in front of me earlier in the semester has evaporated and I'm looking at a third year of no benefits and not enough money to pay the bills and in the mean time the students are all still calling me professor and operating under the assumption that I have some amount of authority to change the way things are at the university. The gap is too big and too disappointing to me. I need a new profession. I've had enough of the bullshit of academia.

A Little Peace and Quiet

Maybe it's the spring weather or just the number of stressful things I've had to deal with, but I've been feeling pretty run down lately. After waiting 45 minutes in my office for a student who never showed up to take a make-up test, I came home to have lunch, work on a proofreading job and clean up a little before the student I tutor comes by for his lesson. Somewhere along the way an overwhelming urge for a nap overtook me and I decided to use the niftly little nap timer on my alarm clock and sleep for 25 minutes. This coincided perfectly with my neighbor deciding to let the dog out. The dog then proceeded to bark more or less the entire 25 minutes of my nap. My alarm apparently shut the dog up for a couple of minutes. He then continued to bark for a couple more until the neighbor put him back in the house. It is now nice and quiet in the neighborhood again. *sigh*

Jump Around

I came to get down,
I came to get down.
So get out your seat and jump around!
Because you know, if we all do it at the same time we might be able to bump the Earth into a new orbit and alleviate global warming and stuff.

Do You Know What Kind Of Bomb It Was?*

This morning I received an email from the admin marked IMPORTANT. It was a forward from the University president about a possible bomb threat on campus. The mail instructed us to check our offices for anything suspicious or that looked like it didn't belong there and if there was anything like that, to call campus police and an officer would come to provide assistance. I thought about calling and explaining that maybe I don't belong there. However, I did actually get up and look around the office. Just the same crap there as always.
*Can anyone place the line?

I Scream For Ice Cream

Although I am now probably wanted by the Motherly War Crimes Tribunal for taking my daughter out for ice cream following her semi-annual dental check up this afternoon, I thought I'd take this opportunity of playing with Flickr to show you one of the good seasonal ice cream joints in town. I think at this point in the season I've got to say my preference is leaning towards Golicks (photo to be posted in the not too distant future as obtaining the photo will create the necessity to go back there for ice cream again) rather than Dover Delite. They both have really good ice cream, but when it gets really hot out there is no shade at Golicks, while you can usually sit in the shade at Dover Delite.

Major Flickr Blogger

mtmajor2

I just signed up at Flickr and have uploaded a few photos. I'm still getting the hang of how to use it and how to get more than one photo into a post, but if you click on the photo you can get a bigger look and see Mt Washington's snowy cap in the background.
Anyway, this is a shot I took from the summit of Mt. Major last Saturday. The icy looking stuff on the lake is indeed ice. I read in the paper today that ice out is set to happen around mid-week. I never knew that was what they called it.

Major Fun

After hounding my experienced mountain dude boyfriend all winter with the question "When are we going hiking?", today we went hiking on Mt. Major. We relaxed most of the morning at home and then drove up to Alton for the hike. I haven't done a lot of hiking in NH, but today wasn't my first time up Mt Major. I remember going with my family when I was 10 or 11 years old. Nothing has changed much, thankfully. (Well, except for the young woman sitting on a ledge smoking a cigarette and looking at her cell phone.)
The lower part of the trail has lots of loose rock and is full of dried leaves. About halfway up there starts to be a lot of rock faces to scramble up and near the top there was even a snow/muddy section to deal with. I remember feeling like I was going to die somewhere after the halfway point when I was a kid and today wasn't much different. I had to take breaks on the way up, but it was beautiful at the summit. The weather today has been clear and in the 60s. There was still a lot of ice on Lake Winnepasaukee and the snow capped summit of Mt Washington was also visible in the distance. It was definitely worth the huffing and puffing it took to get up there. I definitely want to do more hiking. I expect there will be less huffing and puffing the more I do it.

Everybody's Doing It

Today one of my students mentioned she had learned of what I did with another class by reading it on her friend's website. Then that student and another in the class said they also write online. They didn't use the B word. They're all kind of anime freaks so I wouldn't count out Livejournal or some other kind of community of bloggers. I was dying to ask for the urls because it would be interesting to see what they have to say. And at the same time, there's no way I would announce to them that I blog. If they happen to stumble across it, that's fine though.

Sharing is Caring

I just opened up iTunes on my eMac here at work to listen to a language CD and noticed a shared music folder I hadn't recalled being there before. I clicked to see what the heck it was and found out I can access three playlists from other iTunes (Mac users?) users on the network. So thanks to that, I am now listening to Social Distortion, which is one of those bands I've known about forever but never really listened to before. It rocks. I like it. Whoever's list this is, they have a really nice selection of music. And I have no idea who it is. It almost feels like secretly poking around in someone's desk or underwear drawer, except they've chosen to share it.

My Day in Court part I

I finally, finally went to court this morning to start to get this damn divorce thing underway. I was very nervous and shaking a bit, but I wasn't even required to speak to the judge. It was a half hour hearing. It was fine. I think it must be a very interesting place to work. It must be cool to be a judge.

A Little Manic

There's no more snow on the lawn and I even have a picture from Saturday of that and eventually I'll post it because I know the universe will not be right without the proper conclusion to the little series of melting snow posts. I had a great weekend. I even played tennis yesterday with my sister and our kids. I'm so under the wire about some of the dumb legal crap I'm dealing with now. I'd love to rant about it, but I ought to wait until it's over and done with.

Eclipse Day

So, how's the eclipse treating you? So far, I'm good. I enjoyed a nice breakfast with my honey at Harvey's this morning. Then later I found out a student has been accepted into the JET Program, which is a pretty big deal. The weather is beautiful. There's almost no more snow on the lawn. Heard my sis has landed a good job. So far, so good.

Spring Cleaning

I was doing a little spring cleaning of the iBook the other day, going back and deleting old mail that I know I no longer need. I tend to hold on to a lot of my mail because what if it was a mail from someone I really care about and they died or something? At least then I'd have their old mail to read. Also, I tend to forget a lot of things and going back and re-reading old mail reminds me of what was going on at the time.
I've had the iBook for a little over two years now. I managed to trade in my old and seriously ailing, previous iBook for about $700 before I left Japan by feigning ignorance when the guy at Sofmap in Kyoto asked if I knew about a strange, whirring noise the machine made. Of course, the damn thing had totally died on me and then miraculously resurrected a week or so prior to trading it in. I figured out that when it was cold, it would boot up and run okay for about 30 minutes. So I played the part of computer ignorant girl and the old iBook behaved long enough that I got some cash for it.
Anyway, as I was looking back through the sent mail folder I found things I had sent to the then current spouse that were written in Japanese. What struck me about them was that the way I used the language seems really masculine to me now. At first I thought they were mails I had received because they read like a guy had written then. Now I'm wondering about some things, but mostly about how maybe a person can seem very different in different lanugages. I wonder if it's common for people to appear to have different personalities when they shift between cultures or if it was just me doing that Zelig thing I sometimes do.

Yowza!

As news spreads that teens who pledge chastity have lots more kinky sex, millions of aging boomers ask: Where was Bush when I was in high school?
Bill Maher lays it on the line. Makes the 80s seem almost quaint in a way.

Ugg ogg ooogg!

I've got to say I'm impressed fir by Shannon's apt description and catchy naming of a common yet previously unnamed phenomenon, Cave Time. And secondly by this. It's like an upscale version of hiding in the closet or the bathroom.

Sure Signs of Spring

Crocuses blossoming in the neighbors yard.
Small lingering patches of snow getting smaller by the day.
The sign in front of the bank read 61 degrees.
The sign at the entrance to Emery Farm now reads "Opening April 25" instead of "See You In the Spring".
They were painting the tables outside of Dover Delite today.
I'm going to have to take my camera to both Dover Delite and Emery Farm once they open for the season. After that long winter I am so ready to enjoy the nice weather to come.

Winding Up

If the whole world seems like it's going mental consider the fact that we're heading into a pair eclipses in the next 2 weeks. Eclipses are like cans of cosmic whoopass. If you're in need, they will find you.
On the up side, all the swirliness and uneasiness is inspiring me to write. It's nothing that I'd publish here, but it's the kind of thing that becomes fodder for song lyrics. Too early to tell if any of it is any good and too bad that I have to feel it so much to put it down.

Conversational Snippet

"I don't do things like that. I'm demure!" I asserted.
"Yeah. Only if demure is a contraction of demented...and impure," responded my witty boyfriend.
I'm still chuckling over that one. He knows me too well.

Thaw Update

We've had temperatures in the high 40s and low 50s this past week and a weekend of rain, rain, rain, so there's a lot less snow in the yard then there was last week. All those dead leaves are there because the yard never got cleaned up last fall. I thought about doing it, but am I paying all that money for rent to do yardwork? I don't think so. I'm looking forward to the day when I have my own house again.

April Fools!

I'm not really a good practical joker, but in celebration of April Fools day you might want to read some of the top 100 April Fool's hoaxes of all time