Thought Processes

It's occurred to me over the past several months that while you hear terms thrown around---particularly in election years---about "right thinking" and "wrong thinking", I'm not sure how valid those terms are. Thought is a process, not an event, and generally what folks mean by "right thinking" is not that your process is particularly good, or that the steps meet some obscure objective correctness test, but that your conclusions are "right", also known as "in agreement with the person judging the quality of your thought."

And of course "wrong thinking" is "you don't agree with me, you MUST be doing it wrong."

But unless we're actually talking about "you are (according to the rules of logic) taking the wrong steps in processing a syllogism", I don't think those are valid terms.

We "think" about things in a variety of ways; the things we think about are also widely varied. It makes sense to me that, then, the important measure of how we think about some particular thing is whether or not it's productive.

Seems like most folks tend to think about just about everything in their life in the same way: some folks deal with everything emotionally and/or intuitionally, and their language reflects that. "I feel that Sam is the correct candidate" "I feel it will be a long time before he gets that raise" "I feel that 20 people will respond to our party invitation" and so forth. And it works for them, more or less---well enough that they tend not to stop and look at where it fails and why and...oops, wrong group. :) Well, they tend not to feel where it doesn't work and do something different.

Then there's the analytical folks, and it may well already be long obvious reading this blog that I'm in that bunch. Always have been. Not a fence sitter but severely in that camp. Which of course means that sooner or later it should occur to me to stop and analyze exactly when and where stopping and analyzing doesn't work, no? :)

Later rather than sooner, I guess. All that has been to lead up to this point: I've been trying to figure out why trying to sort out certain people/events/situations throughout my life has always failed. It's always become a circular morass with no solution---something of a logical equivalent to dividing by zero. And I've finally found the mantra that covers the situation.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

Long version has something to do with dysfunctionality by its very nature being a form of chaos, and logic assumes coherence. Doesn't matter. The point is that dysfunctional families, dysfunctional households, dysfunctional people, dysfunctional friendships, dysfunctional work situations, dysfunctional parishes---whatever---do not operate by any logic other than an internal, twisted version of logic. Usually one living in one individual's mind, to which the other inhabitants of the situation learn to imitate well enough to function in the situation. And that learning is so subtle and gentle, they don't realize that what they're learning in "getting to know the place" is the rules of its dysfunctionality.

(That may be true of all situations, and there may be no true functionality anywhere. But I'm referring to the more severe cases, situations which tend to be destructive to many or all persons involved.)

But that's not "source code" to the logic, it's just a "workaround"---so that the longer a person is outside that dysfunctional situation, the more of an "outsider" they become---if the situation is past, they lose their understanding of how it functioned; if it's current, they lose their ability to blend back in, and/or the rules continue to evolve without them, so that they no longer have the correct key, nor can they.

Doesn't entirely matter. What matters is acquiring the ability to derail the brain from that circular trap by repeating the mantra.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

You cannot apply logic to dysfunctionality.

Here endeth today's lesson. :)

Kids Just Take Over Everything.....

Some five weeks or more after taking the desktop computer to the Apple store for hospitalization (it was *before* Sweetpea was born!), it's home and fixed.....

And the baby of the household seems determined to make the leap that that makes the laptop HER computer. Doesn't seem to matter how often she's evicted. It's HERS, thank you. To type on, dance on, sleep on, and try to catch those funny characters on the screen.....

Baby Cakes: The Movie

New Grandbaby!

She's here, I've seen her, I've held her....and the picture above is by her big sister, Baby Cakes.

Miss Sweet Pea is here! And she's adorable, as all grandbabies are of course........ :)

A Bafflement to Me.....

Here's a question that's been in my head for a while, now, and I've posed it to a number of people over the years.

Nobody's ever had a usable answer to it; I throw it out here in case someone reading this has one.

Why do companies send you bills for a specific amount, for which their known policy is "we do not accept partial payments, payment is due in full only".....

.....and then put a box on the payment slip for you to fill in that says "Here' s how much I'm sending."

"Hey! Ya owe us $128.37! We demand that you send us $128.37! No more! No less!"



"So! How much ya sending us, huh?"

Only company I know of that doesn't do that is American Express. They presume their customers are bright enough to understand the rules......

A Quotation that Struck Me.....

Kin-folks! They are such homey sounding words and strong, too, and sweet. Folks who are akin---why they need not even be relatives or “blood kin!” What a vista that opens up! They are scattered all over the world, these kin-folks of ours and we will find them wherever we go, folks who are akin to us in thought and belief, in aspirations and ideas, tho our relatives may be far away.

--Laura Ingalls Wilder, Missouri Ruralist, 5 August 1916

More Tails of the Cat Door......

[Post edited 8/21/08 to add mug shot of The Culprit....]

Wednesday night, sound asleep.

The cat door is right next to my bed. The only cat who uses it is Sarah. It's now permanently set to "can enter, cannot exit" courtesy of Astra's adventure.

(Astra, as we know, would love to, but she's not permitted. Morgan's too afraid of ending up homeless again to go out unless I'm less than a foot away, and Tondra won't use the cat door, although she loves to go out.)

I wake up enough to hear the thwack-thwack of the cat door being used, think "Sarah's in", go back to sleep.

I hear a crash, half open one eye, see shadowy form of cat in dark having knocked down the extended platform at the window. Think "Way to go, Sarah", go back to sleep.

I hear the sounds of a major cat fight in the hallway. There are still signs of less than perfect harmony in the household, with half the cats being resident less than two months, but it has always been hissy fits up until now. I think "Okay, somebody's having a major disagreement about the pecking order" and get up to go make sure nobody's taking unfair advantage of the kitten.

And realize that it was NOT Sarah who came in. It was a grey and white cat who lives somewhere in the neighborhood.

He/She had stuck his head in the cat door before, seen me reading, and vamoosed. Silly me, I thought that had taken care of its curiosity. In retrospect, knocking down the platform was probably related to "what do you mean, this door doesn't work to get back OUT? I gotta get OUT right now!"

Middle of the night, I'm chasing a cat who doesn't belong there all over the house. I have Astra behind closed doors, and the front door propped open, but this cat keeps going past it to try to insist on going out the living room window. Eventually, he figures it out and scoots out the door. I then spend the next hour cleaning up the disaster he's left in his path.

Hopefully, that's his last adventure with the cat door. We'll see.

Catspiracy Theory.....

Astra's been exploring every inch of the house, including the indoor side platform of the window-mounted cat door. She's shown some fascination with looking out the small clear window bit of the cat door, and so I suppose today was inevitable.

I came home from work and did my standard routine of finding and saying hello to all the (now four) cats as I took my clothes off in preparation for a shower. (Working in non-air-conditioned splendor in summer means that first thing on the agenda when getting home is a cool shower....) About the time I was grabbing a towel and heading into the bathroom I realized that only three cats---three relatively LARGE cats---had checked in.

I did a bit of a fast pass at the house calling Astra, but had to wait until after my shower and getting dressed for a serious kitten-hunt. Of course, since she hadn't responded inside, the odds were pretty good she'd finally explored the cat door, which I hadn't thought she'd try this young. And as soon as I opened the sliding glass door to the back yard, I was greeted by a kitten bounding out from under some of the flowers, yowling her head off, telling mommy about her day.

Now I know she was out there because she got a bit too adventurous. But I still can't help picturing Sarah, Tondra and Morgan banding together:

"Look, you're a kitten. You need to learn things. You have to go to school. Mommy told us to tell you, really. Just go thru that door and wait a couple of minutes, and the school bus will be right by. I promise. Really." (Shove.)

They just didn't look innocent *enough* when I came in, I guess. One of those moments when you wish for a webcam.

Year Two....

...been a year now in Indianapolis. And that whole year has been mostly about finding my feet, trying to land on my feet after what felt like falling out of a mid-air jet crash without a parachute.

As starts go, it's been okay. So what is year two going to be about?

Don't know yet. Fine tuning, certainly; maybe less treading water just trying to stay afloat and more choosing where and how to swim.

By the way, Astra seems to have her Whole Name now: Astra V. Khat.

Astrakhat as in Astrakhan. V. as in Velcro. :)

it Never Rains But it Pours....

....also known, I guess, as when you dream of a particular face that you've never seen before, and then it turns up in your life needing a home, you have to let it stay.....



So welcome to Miss Astra. A stray, abandoned at the house of a co-worker, she's rapidly taking over the house and trying to win over all her big sisters.....

Oh, and by the way, it looks like I aced both summer school classes. Woohoo!

New Baby (?)

Tondra's getting up there in years.....17, quite respectable for a cat.....and all in all, is doing quite well for that age.

Sarah's seven now, at the prime of adulthood, and having lost her large wetlands to play in that she had at our last house, is really hard up for *attention* and a *playmate*.

She tries to play with Tondra. Tondra isn't interested. When she gets to be enough of a royal pain in the tail, Tondra hauls off and clocks her one. But that's the extent of the interaction.

Sarah needs a playmate, clearly, although equally clearly she doesn't want one---she wants the one she already has (me) to stop this silly going to work thing and stay home all day and play with her.

That's obviously not going to happen.

With all the flooding we've had in southern Indiana, we're also having an adoptable animal crisis. We have several counties whose humane societies are desperate to adopt out critters of both the feline and canine variety.

So today friend Ellen and I betook ourselves down to Morgan County, to the humane society in Martinsville. And when we came home again, we were three: me, Ellen, and Morgan LeFeline, a ten pound, two year old, black and white female. ("Morgan" she came with; "LeFeline" I bestowed on her on the way home.....a girl's got to have enough name to be able to hold up her head around Tondra Shadowcat and Sarah Jane Sparklecat Getouttathere!) And I always did like Morgan LeFay.....

Not the Only DSL Company in Town...but AT&T Sure Acts Like It is

Monday, May 5th. 6:40 pm.

My AT&T DSL goes down. I call AT&T’s customer service number. After wading through a lengthy voice mail, I reach a recording telling me the Indianapolis area is experiencing an outage expected to last until 10:15 pm.

I hang up, and continue to try to connect around 10:15 pm and later. At midnight, I go to bed.

Awake again at 3:45 am. I have a final examination I’m supposed to take online on Tuesday. I reckon I’ll sleep better if I know the system’s back up, so I go poke at it. It’s not. I call AT&T again. I get someone named Jules in some customer service center overseas. Based on the accents of the various people I speak to there, I assume it’s India.

After a half hour of diagnostics with Jules, he decides it’s a modem fault, and tells me someone will call me in the morning to schedule a visit to see and probably replace the modem. He gives me a case number, which I record.

Tuesday, May 6th. 1:30 pm.

No telephone call. It is not morning anymore.

I call AT&T again, with the interminable menus and waits. I get a female person named Sam. She says nothing was ever done to ask anyone to come look at my modem, has no faith that the modem is the problem, insists on an hour of “try this, try that.” After an hour, she decides that maybe I need to talk to one of their Mac specialists. Didn’t get that name. Mac person wants to start over from scratch. No progress a half hour later. Mac person escalates me to Don, second tier. Second tier appears, by the sound of it, to actually be in the US.

Don tries another half-hour’s worth of stuff. At the end of all this, he comes to the same conclusion Jules did, actually: there’s something wrong with the modem. He creates a trouble ticket and promises someone will call me within four hours. He takes both my home number and my cell number to ensure I’m reachable. He gives me the direct connect number for the department that actually sends people out.

Wednesday, May 7th. 10:30 am.

No telephone call. It is not between two and six pm on Tuesday anymore, by quite a bit. I call the direct connect number. No voice menus, but still a lengthy wait. I get Sheila. No explanation of why I wasn’t called, but it doesn’t sound like she’s surprised. She tries poking at the modem again from her end, with no difference. She allows as how this is not the first case of this precise problem they’ve seen today. I begin to suspect it’s something that AT&T has broken in their outage/security upgrades to the Indianapolis area system.

Sheila tells me the earliest anyone can actually come out is Thursday. I tell her I have to work Thursday afternoon and need them to come in the morning. She calls Deb in scheduling to try to get that done.

After a full hour, including holds, I’m told that no, they cannot come out when I’m off work; they are only available when it means I have to take off work---and with my manager going off work for a medical procedure, this is not a time where I can take off to deal with this. Which, given the days I have to be there because he won’t be, and I’ll be needed, means “you’ll be offline over a week.”

I tell Sheila this is not acceptable, and she says she will escalate it to her manager and they will call me back. Reluctantly, I hang up the phone with no visit from tech support actually scheduled. It is 11:35 am.

12:30 pm.

Sheila calls back, wonder of wonders. Her manager says no, I will have to take off work or wait until Tuesday. Reluctantly, I agree to take off Thursday afternoon, that being the only part of that time frame where that’s even possibly doable at work.

Thursday afternoon. 2:30 pm.

Jason & Jason arrive at my door. These guys are clueful, courteous, tidy, and competent. Yes, the modem is broken. They replace it, make sure everything’s detangled in terms of IDs and passwords, make sure both machines are back online and working perfectly. We’re good to go: I’ve found where the competence at AT&T hides. Too bad I can’t just get these guys’ number for my next problem, if any.

The Huntress is Still on the Prowl

I’d wondered whether Sarah was still a hunter since we moved to Indianapolis. Deprived of the large park area to roam in, she’s chunked up a bit. And while I kept her inside for a couple of months after we moved, I knew it was inevitable she’d get out sooner or later, and that for my sanity and hers, I was going to have to let her out. So I installed a cat door--the sort that actually installs in a window--and waited for the inevitable joy of her bringing in prey. Dead, if I was lucky.

It’s not that I wanted her to hunt. I just understood that there’s a primal huntress alive and well in this particular cat, as there had been in her sister, Tondra, in her heyday. At 17, though, Tondra had long since conceded the hunting tasks to Sarah.

It was autumn, still prime hunting time, but nothing. Winter, nothing, but I thought perhaps that was due to lack of available prey: birds gone south, mice hunkered down warm in some inaccessible hole.

Spring. I wondered if perhaps the cat door being at window height meant that she might be catching something, but could not manage to get it into the house. That would be lovely, from my standpoint. I pretty much stopped thinking about it. Until Tuesday.

I was putting up a curtain rod over the great room window that faces into the back yard. Because I was doing so, I just happened to see a cheerful Sarah bouncing through the back yard with a mouthful of bird.

Before I could even consider doing something about it, I watched her bound to the bedroom window and prove that she had no trouble going through the cat door with a mouthful of prey, at least bird-sized prey.

I had no idea whether this bird was live or dead; it wasn’t moving, but I have enough experience to know that’s not especially relevant. And if you’ve read earlier entries in my blog, you know that I’m terrified of live birds in the house. I had to catch that cat before she opened her mouth.

I ran into the bedroom, where she’d just jumped down from the window. I swooped down on her, picked her up, and ran to the kitchen, where I opened the screen door and shoved her into the back yard, closing the screen behind her.

I noted her offended look as I then sprinted back to the bedroom to lock the cat door. That done, I could take my time returning to see how things were progressing. In the kitchen, Tondra was showing interest in going out and watching the proceedings, so I let her out. I then returned to my curtain rod and front seat view of the back yard.

Sure enough, after looking around for a good place to be and not finding one that appealed to her, Sarah bounded back to the cat door and attempted to bring the bird in yet again. She was not happy when she discovered that she couldn’t come in, but my problem was solved, and I turned my attention to the hardware---until I heard squawking. I peeked out the window to discover the bird flying away while Sarah tried to catch her in midair.

OK: I guess we’ve established she still hunts. And that the bird was live and quite healthy.
Which seems to make it inevitable that one of these days I’ll come home from work to find an avian critter staring at me, inside my house.

Woids! Woids! Woids!

If, when you're all worn out, you're exhausted.....
........when you're bright and chipper and full of pep, are you hausted?

If taking a bad situation and making it worse is exacerbating it.....
.......is the process of improving the situation acerbating it?

If, when it's time for bed, you extinguish the candles......
.......when it's time for romance, do you tinguish them?

(Alternatively, if to stand out from the crowd is to be distinguished....
......is to be just like everyone else to be tinguished?)

If you drive 45 mph past a school, and are exceeding the speed limit....
......do you keep your mama from complaining from the back seat by ceeding?

Just more of the weird word wonderings I do when I'm overtired and underslept.... :)

Really the Same? Or An Illusion?

It occurs to me, as I dine on leftover "bisketti" made like that of my childhood, that Everybody Knows that "spaghetti" and "bisketti" are the same thing; the latter's just a "cute" kid's way of saying spaghetti.

You know, I'm not so sure about that.

Spaghetti has long pasta strands that require a bit of coordinated twirling with a fork.

Bisketti has the pasta broken into short bits, and may have been cut even smaller by Mom, Grandma, or in time of desperation, yourself.

Spaghetti has a sauce---one of many possible sauces---ladled in a pool atop the center of a pile of pasta.

Bisketti has a sauce---always red sauce, with meat, unless it's Friday in Lent---mixed in, thoroughly, and if you're really lucky, has had time for the pasta to *absorb* the tomatoey goodness.

Spaghetti has a whole possible range of spiciness.

Bisketti is seasoned, definable as something other than plain tomato sauce, certainly, but not "spicy" in any recognizable sense of heat.

Heck, by those standards, there's less difference between spaghetti and ravioli (restaurant or homemade ravioli, not canned) than there is between spaghetti and bisketti.

I vote that those are two separate dishes, for sure. Bisketti's a comfort food. Spaghetti is an adult dining experience.

Sometimes I want spaghetti. And sometimes nothing will do but good ol' bisketti.

OK: It's Cute Once, Don't Do It Again Department.....

Note to self:

Never, NEVER again sign up to take a class---online or not---that crams 16 weeks into 8 weeks if you're already working 30+ hours a week and taking two other "conventional" classes.

Just don't. This way lies madness.

Especially if the class is heavy on papers.

I may not see daylight again until May.

Oy.

Bubbles!

Somehow (tiny fingers playing with the camera and turning all the knobs, I suspect) I ended up taking a movie of Squeegles at the Zeum in Naperville when I meant to be taking a still.

Quality ain't what it could be, since I was taken by surprise. Still, here it is....

Somewhere along the line, I'll get more of the "Zeum" pix up.....but I think we'll be skipping the ones Little Squeegles took.

You see, the only time Little Squeegles got her hands on the camera in the museum was when Big Squeegles was Using the Plumbing Facilities. Which is now digitally commemorated.

When you're committed to sitting where you're sitting, you cannot confiscate a camera from a toddler dancing just out of your reach, snapping shots of you sitting there, drawers around your ankles.

**(sigh)**

Fortunately, digital shots don't have to be sent out for some stranger to giggle at as they develop them....that's an image I could live without. :)

Life in the Arts.....

.....or how not to grow your community theatre (thereby insuring it's just you and your buds, undisturbed.)

A new calendar year dawns. You are contacted, out of the blue.....

Newbie: "Hi, I'm new in these parts, and I'd really like to come help out at your theatre. I have experience. Can I come play?"

You: "Are you a member? You have to be a member. It's $15 a year. Here's your membership form. It includes a place to mark what areas you want to volunteer in."

Newbie: Sends in membership form with money and areas marked.

You: "Thanks, you're now a member of our theatre for the next six months." [We didn't mention that our membership year is by season, and there's no discount, no matter how far into the season we are? Too bad, we have your money now.] "By the way, here's the form to order season tickets." [They're on the same basis: half the season's over, tickets are same price they were last summer before the season started.]

Newbie: Once bitten, twice shy, does not order "season tickets" for the back half of the season.

You haven't said they have to buy tickets to come and play, and they probably don't---you're just hoping in their enthusiasm they will.

You: Add them to the mailing list for new shows and auditions. Never contact them again. When they don't re-join, either don't notice at all, or mutter about how "they must not have been VERY interested, after all...." and feel self-righteous about not having wasted the time actually responding to them.

Just a hypothetical scenario, of course......no real community theatre would act that way, would they? Certainly not any here in beautiful Indianapolis.......

It's Curtains for You!

Well, I should be in bed.

But I just couldn't resist seeing what the finished curtain panels would look like; I had to piece one.

Of course it's going to acquire backing and batting and get quilted and bound, but this is the core piecework.....

I think it's going to be very cheerful: I like it.

Not Dead Yet!

Just nothing momentous.....

Closed the campus last night....after I spent an hour and ten minutes making the 25 minute drive there in a sleet storm....

So no idea when that midterm will actually happen. Presumably Easter week (gack, like there's not enough going on that week...)

Electric's done. Ceiling fixing next.

Working on curtains for the great room. Furniture rearranged; some new picture frames bought and pictures redone and hung. Pix online eventually.

Trying to make weekly posts in a spiritual blog. We'll see how that goes. So far managing to get it in on Sunday or within 24 hours thereof, but that's only two weeks....

Da Stove!

Og!

Invent!

Fire!

Og Roolz!

Erm, sorry, not quite caveman...(ahem)...cavewoman department.

But the stove, she works! She gets hot enough to invoke blower! She commits beauty (and warmth) upon the room!

Woohoo!

Death of a Fireplace

Nothing like buying a house in a significant part for the fireplace only to discover it's a firetrap that should have burned the house down 35 years ago. **sigh**

It's gone, now; torn out, and the underlying construction of it as it came down started to make one suspect that the room it lived in (an add-on 15-20 years after the original house was built) was one of those semi-clueless owner-and-brother-in-law projects.

Once we had the fireplace out, the first other thing that became apparent was that they weren't much as electricians, either. Bare wire splice in the ceiling---I really don't like looking up at live bare copper wire. **sigh redux**

Call electrician. What started as "tear fireplace out and replace with woodstove" project is getting pricier by the minute.

Stove should be here tomorrow and installed, blizzard/ice storm permitting. Electrician next week. But it's going to end up with a number of outstanding electrical issues fixed that I knew I'd have to deal with sooner or later.

Then I suppose I have to find someone to repair the ceiling. **trinity of sighs**

Eventually, I'm going to redo the terminally-70's panelled walls in there, and that room is going to ROCK. It will all be worth it in the end....if I survive.....

Once the stove is in, I'll try to get some pictures up.

Weird Weather!

From 53 degrees and slightly rainy to wild high winds and tornadoes on the ground.....to 16 degrees and violent snow blowing horizontally, in two hours.

In January.


That was last evening; today it's off to work in {shudder] nine degree weather.....

View from my bedroom window:


Dunno what to do with that, especially in this cold. {re-shudder} Oh, well, off to work!

New Beginnings: Employment

....got the job I'd been waiting to see if I'd get....

Is it just me, or do you never get over that initial nervousness? It's like the first day of school....not being sure how to present, how it will go, what to do.....

Not scared. Eager. Anticipation. Kind of a mental loop of "Oh wow oh shit oh wow oh shit oh wow!"

First job in my new field, and me still in school. Deep breath.

I go in tomorrow morning for the drug test scheduling, pounds of paperwork filling, and so forth......

Meanwhile, I've gone on a rampage of piecing baby quilt tops. Started out light on inspiration, then picked up speed and actually found some.

Baby Quilt Tops

They're not in the order I made them, but in the order I photographed them, more or less. You might be able to sort the poorly-inspired from the later stuff, I dunno.... :)

The Clueless in the DELL

The joys of getting a divorce, complicated by the fact that my ex has changed from a male human with a masculine name ("Guy", shall we say) to a female human with a feminine name ("Girl", for blog purposes).

Between us, we had subscriptions to six different Dell publications (puzzle magazines, mystery magazines, sf magazines). Time was, my four subscriptions were under my name ("Piggie", for our purposes); his two were under his name ("Guy").

I noticed somewhere along the way that somebody in their subscription department had decided to "tidy up" subscriptions to the same address/same surname, and all six subscriptions had started coming to "Piggie/Guy Surname", but didn't think much of it. I hope they held out for matching surnames at least when they made the decision, and didn't "consolidate" the accounts of folks in different apartments in the same building...

Fast forward to divorce/separate households. Lovely online forms; I try to change the ex's subscriptions to her new address and the name on hers to her new name.

[You would THINK someone at Dell had heard of divorce. Hell, I'd be inclined to assume someone at Dell has HAD a divorce their very own selves! But apparently not.]

Dell refuses to change the name, insists on moving ALL SIX subscriptions to the ex's new residence.

I move mine back and try to change name AGAIN; it moves all six, insists that the subscriptions MUST belong to "Piggie/Guy", will not change that. I sell house and move, change address, try to change name again.

To this day, still getting all six subscriptions at my address, all to "Piggie/Guy", cannot get that changed, cannot get them separated. Have decided the only way out of this morass is to let ALL subscriptions expire, but half suspect they will attempt to resurrect "Piggie/Guy" even as a new subscription. Attempts to contact customer service and reach a human online have accomplished precisely zip.

Having managed today (with the investment of time, patience, and a hands-free headset) to get the AARP accounts sorted out and the existence of Mr. No Such Person Not Married deleted (yes, I have physical possession of a membership card in that name), I'm contemplating tackling Dell tomorrow by phone.

If I'm brave.

Wish me luck.

New Beginnings

And a new semester has started, and a new phase in the RCIA class.....

It so happened last week that the youth group bake sale and our first week of break-out discussion were on the same week, so Kathy, who was leading our discussion, picked up a few cookies at the sale for our own sort of "community sharing", sharing some of the community-type characteristics of the Eucharist.

I thought that was pretty cool, so I made banana bread tonight to take for tomorrow's break-out discussion......

I'm having a bit of trouble getting my head in gear for the new semester. One of my classes got cancelled; another doesn't start until March. Of the other two, it's not that I'm unenthusiastic about the material---I'm not. Just having trouble getting back into the homework mentality.....

It'll come. Just feeling a half a bubble out of plumb at the moment, and very alone.

Update: Make-It!

I've been reminded by Lil Squeegles that the appliance in question is NOT called a "microwave", it's called a "make-it."

I sit corrected. :)

Job Description of a Gramma

Part of the job description of a Gramma is that they Fix Things. Making Everything Better is our specialty.....even if it's just repairing our thrift shop kitchen.

Lovely workplace, it is, except that the microwave worked a tad iffily in the absence of a door.

One Gramma, two screws, one sidewalk chalk bin lid, one cable tie and a bit of yellow duct tape later, the microwave has a door.

Better get really good at this Gramma stuff: second grandbaby on the way!

But this one will always be Gramma's Special Baby Cakes.....even when she's sixteen and would much rather not be. :)