I haven't read the news.
I don't know what's going on in the world.
I don't have time to blog.
I haven't adjusted to this new life of new job, new internship and new classes and painting in overdrive in all other waking moments.
I have lots to tell.
I'm too tired to tell.
I haven't adjusted to this new life...
Eventually. Eventually. Eventually.
Where have I been? Hubby and I took a 10th anniversary trip to Cancun, where I spent approximately 67 percent of the time vomiting and pooping vile substances thanks to food poisoning I got BEFORE leaving the country. However, I did feel good enough to swim with the dolphins (highly recommended!!!) and take a horseback ride on the beach.
I no longer work in marketing. I am a social worker. Weird.
I started my new job with the geriatric outreach program and also my internship with the veterinary social work program. It made for a stressful week...career change, beginning classes and beginning a new internship.
The vet hospital is a maze with every hallway looking exactly the same. At least I can follow my nose to the large animal section (hay and poop!). Within all those halls, interns, residents, vet techs and veterinarians are flitting around like bees in a hive. Better watch those swinging doors...and don't look inside the necropsy (autopsies for critters) room unless you want to see a kitty in several parts like I did today before I headed out of the building...ugh.
Not quite like sitting at a desk all day. My feet hurt and I'm laden with cell phones for both jobs--not to mention my personal one. I hope I can remember to keep them all charged. Sheesh.
I rarely even have time to check email, much less blog. But, I'm guessing I'll find a way to do it...maybe as a bedtime ritual or something.
I also have a Saturday morning class, which sucks, but I can take it from home via the Internet, which is pretty cool. We'll be logging in and viewing a presentation as well as participating via microphone and speakers. It will be interesting to see how the first meeting goes this Saturday.
And that's all the nutshells I can crack for now.
This is a 10 x 20 acrylic painting called "The Garbage Men Cometh!" I am gathering up paintings for the show in November and this one will be on display at our local paper as a preview to the show. I'm pretty excited about being in a fine arts show.
Sorry the picture is so crappy (especially washed out on the right side), but I just varnished it this morning and they're picking it up this afternoon, so I literally took the photo as I was running out the door.
On a sad-happy-confused-angst-ridden-note, I have four hours left as a marketing professional. Today is my last day. It's been a nice last week though, with many heartfelt good-byes and nice exchanges. I will miss so many people. I didn't realize how attached I was! My good blog buddy, Barry will keep everyone under control. Thanks for everything B! :-)
Today was my "farewell" lunch at work. I am so sad to leave my old marketing family, even if I don't want to be in marketing anymore. I got a great card, packed with sweet good luck messages and a surprise gift certificate to my favorite art supply store. :-)
I am in the process of cleaning out my office, which is a real bitch, emotionally and physically. That's the price of being a pack-rat. Wah.
I am leaving for Mexico on Sunday for a 10th anniversary trip and everything is all set--a friend to live at the house and take care of the cats, boarding for the dogs... Great!
I am coming down with a cold. Not so great.
Those last two items need to NOT happen at the same time.
But I'm afraid they are going to. Echinacea and zinc here I come.
My husband just called me and said his car broke down and it has to be towed to the garage ($$$ we don't have).
I broke a crown chewing on ice and had to have it fixed yesterday (more $$$ I don't have).
Life is never dull.
"Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret."
--Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan
Bizarre that I had dream last night my boss had decided to become a nurse practitioner and had to give me rabies shots... This article was brought to my attention through an animal studies list-serv. Nauseating and unnerving to say the least...
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 1, 2006
SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- A county in southwestern China has killed as many as 50,000 dogs in a government campaign ordered after three people died from rabies, official media reported Tuesday.
The five-day massacre in Yunnan province's Mouding county spared only military guard dogs and police canine units, the Shanghai Daily reported, citing local media.
Dogs being walked were taken from their owners and beaten on the spot, the newspaper said. Other killing teams entered villages at night, creating noise to get dogs barking, then honing in and beating them to death.
Owners were offered 63 cents per animal to kill their dogs before the teams were sent in, the report said.
The massacre was widely discussed on the Internet, with both legal scholars and animal rights activists criticizing it as crude and cold-blooded. The World Health Organization said more emphasis needed to be placed on prevention.
''Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn't do their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first place,'' Legal Daily, a newspaper run by the central government's Politics and Law Committee, said in an editorial in its online edition.
Dr. Francette Dusan, a WHO expert on diseases passed from animals to people, said effective rabies control required coordinated efforts between human and animal health agencies and authorities.
''This has not been pursued adequately to date in China with most control efforts consisting of purely reactive dog culls,'' Dusan said.
The Shanghai Daily said 360 of Mouding county's 200,000 residents suffered dog bites this year. The three rabies victims included a 4-year-old girl, the report said.
''With the aim to keep this horrible disease from people, we decided to kill the dogs,'' Li Haibo, a spokesman for the county government was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Calls to county government offices rang unanswered on Tuesday.
China has seen a major rise in the number of rabies cases in recent years,
with 2,651 reported deaths from the disease in 2004, the last year for which
data was available, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and
Prevention.
Experts have tied the rise in part to an increase in dog ownership,
particularly in rural areas where about 70 percent of households keep dogs.
Only about 3 percent of Chinese dogs are vaccinated against rabies, according
to the center. Access to appropriate treatment is highly limited, especially
in the countryside.
The times I despise most in my life are those times when I balk and get the dreaded deer-in-the-headlights syndrome.
I am a deer.
Maybe I am a tick on a deer.
I need to clean out 17 years of files before I leave this job. What do I do with them? I am such a bad filer, I should probably just throw them all away. It's all on my computer anyway. I am replete with junk as old as 1989, along with about 10 years of photos that need to be sorted.
This transition is causing me far more heartache than I expected. I nearly cried when I said goodbye to the graphic artist who does the newsletter I work on. He's a little man who works for a local printer part-time in semi-retirement and teaches calligraphy on the side. He probably doesn't weigh more than 110 pounds and lost his wife a couple of years ago. I didn't realize how much I would miss his old bony butt. I am going take him a dozen doughnuts one last time in a vain attempt to fatten him up. ;-)
The department I'm going to work in part-time while finishing out my last year of school is pretty volatile in terms of relationships. I will be going from a department that was too toned-down and uptight (but had 0% backstabbing) to one that might be way too high-strung, passive-aggressive and full of conflict. They are having a retreat partly to work out their personal differences. THAT scares me.
And it should.
I feel totally neurotic and am worried about everything. I'm not too good at worrying about the unknown. The anticipatory angst is driving me nuts.
That's the problem with working with one department or having one job for too long. You get worried you can't do anything else, or that leaving the safe place you're in is going to be a huge mistake.
In 10 working days we're going to find out.
Hopefully I won't implode from all the self-imposed pressure.
I have been feeling really down lately, so blogging has slowed down. These are the times I wish my blog was anonymous so I could chat about less superficial things, but alas, this blog is only semi-anonymous, so I must be semi-cautious. I don't want get bitten in the ass by my own blog (unless of course it bites me in such a way as to give me a butt-lift to make me look like I did when I was 20 years old).
I miss knitting, but I don't have time to do it anymore. When I do have time after work, study, internship and puppy maintenance, I need to paint for the show in November. Someday I will be out of school and I will only have ONE job. Someday.
Which does bring me to the point that I will be selling a significant portion of my yarn stash on Ebay. There's no reason to keep it around at this point. By the time I get to use it, I won't be interested in all those previous selections.
I shall give proper notice to you knitters out there who might want to partake of such a wooly purge.
For a more interesting post, click here
I have printed out calendars before, marking off the months, weeks and days before I quit my dead-end marketing job, but now that it's LESS than a month away, I am, as the children like to say, "pooing my pants."
Perhaps my first accident came when I figured out on paper that I would be taking a $29,000 pay cut. Yes, that was a big one; requiring an ongoing change of the undergarments. I would have had to put my plastic play pants on had I decided to go to the pool...
The next stinky accident came to pass because I couldn't transfer on the day I wanted, wreaking all kinds of havoc in my finally-got-this-schedule-squared-away mindset I had finally achieved. No, nothing is easy. I had to massage, finagle, and rebuild all of that--all over again. This morning it is mostly settled thankfully.
More smelly events are in the future, as when I walk out the door on Aug. 11 and effectively end my 18-year marketing career. I won't be an editor in the professional sense anymore. I won't get to play with the company's intranet, or blow ridiculous amounts of film trying to make boring events look exciting.
I won't get to be our online "Dear Abbeee" anymore (I managed an online Q&A for our company). I will really miss that. Before I started that forum I was a stern defender of the stance, "There are NO stupid questions." I was wrong. Dead wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. There ARE stupid questions. Really, really, really stupid questions. It was fun to read them and even more fun to try to answer them.
I won't get to play with my graphics program anymore to correct all the hideous photographs other marketing folks send me for the company-wide newsletter. But I won't miss that newsletter. Good riddance. I wash my hands of thee...blech. Pooey.
More on all that ongoing crap later. I suddenly ran out of blog-steam.
In my opinion of course. I have a relative who is a geologist who is quite particular about his job. Several years ago he used to inspect materials and areas where major construction was to occur. If he identified substandard concrete or other materials he reported them to his company. Unfortunately those warnings were usually ignored and actually got him labeled as a "trouble-maker."
He reported it because it was IMPORTANT.
I'm sure this wasn't exactly the same situation, but this kind of slop goes on all the time. Some of the things he told me really made me mad...that the stuff they were using wouldn't stand up to pressure, etc. But HE was a "trouble-maker."
Why doesn't it matter until someone dies, or even more feared by them, sues.
Which brings me to another sore spot...
...The slow death of small business thanks to white-collar thieves. When I am late on a payment for something, I get a call from some slob in upper New York with personal anger management issues. And I find a way to get caught up. When a small business provides a service and the client doesn't pay on time, they get a call from the company. And then they ignore it. And then they NEVER PAY.
This is otherwise known as stealing.
And it happens all the time at my husband's company. They purchase services. They receive the services. They don't pay--for months and sometimes not at all.
Why? Because they know a small business won't have the money to sue.
Personally, I think these fuckers need to go to jail. It's one of the reasons why we struggled so hard financially while hubby was in training. In a 100 percent commission job, you have to get paid to eat. And they weren't paying. Fortunately, there are some other clients in the mix right now that get the cash flow going.
And that's what I'm worried about as I look "forward" to going part-time next month. A couple more good paychecks and my income drops by about 60 percent and my benefit cost triples (part-timers get screwed on benefits at our company). So, small-business-thieves can make our lives miserable.
Pay small businesses on-time, please! (Or I'll strangle you with yarn from my obscenely large stash that just-sits-there-because-I-don't-have-time-to-knit-anymore.)
But that's another post.
That would be me.
We've been working with our dogs on socialization and leash-walking lately, so while my husband was working out a couple of nights ago I took each dog around the block separately. First Petey and I made the trek and then I came back and got Pepper, who is the dog we most need to socialize because of her shyness.
So.
So, I'm walking around the block and my neighbor comes out with his girlfriend and their three fairly large dogs. Pepper gets a little bent out of shape over the excited dogs, but not too bad. We say "hi" and then he asks me if I am a "professional dog-walker" now.
This is where I get stupid. No, make that stoopid.
I say, "No, I'm your neighbor." I point at my house and add, "I live right there."
No shit.
Apparently Pepper ate my brains and shat them out on the backside of the city block. Because they weren't with me with I said that.
They took pity on me and didn't laugh out loud or let their jaws drop open...at least not right then, because perhaps they knew my rancid brains were around the corner steaming in the Tennessee humidity.
A few steps later and after thinking, well, I have lived here 10 years, I came to the high-powered conclusion that he probably DID RECOGNIZE ME AFTER ALL. And, just perhaps, he was utilizing that humor thing. Just PERHAPS.
I thought I heard Pepper whine, "duh, really?"
But it's too late. It's all gone down in the annals of unexplainable, STOOPID behavior. I probably elicited a block-long conversation on the finer points of being STOOPID.
STOOPID NEIGHBOR.
Dat's me. Somebody get me the pooper scooper. I'm going back to get my brains.
Too bad THIS GUY doesn't live in my neighborhood. I would have been the first taker.
All you people who park in handcapped designated spots because you are LAZY and SELFISH.
I went to the grocery store at lunch to pick up some goodies and when I drove in I stopped for two ladies to cross from the door into the parking lot. One lady had a grocery cart totally full of items. She pushed her cart on to her car somewhere in the bowels of the lot. The other lady had nothing, was jabbering on a cell phone, casually walked in front of me and got into a van in the very first handicapped spot in front of the door. Then she just sat there yacking on the phone. No hangtag, no plate, no anything--just a big beeyotch with an over-sprayed blonde bob and a cellphone jammed in her ear. I tried to give her a dirty look as I parked and walked into the store, but she was so absorbed in her conversation and rearranging the contents of her purse that she was oblivious to all that was around her.
She was well-dressed, in her late 40's and didn't limp, cough, or lurch. In fact she seemed extremely relaxed and not in a hurry at all.
I see so many really old and slightly handicapped people purposely NOT park in these spaces because they want to give those spaces to people who have wheelchairs or crutches--and because they want to function as normally as possible.
I suppose not having a brain or a heart would be considered a handicap...
First, thank you for getting this far into the letter. I would like to ask for a few things that would make my life sooooo much easier. Yes, they are rather mundane and ordinary, but gosh, if you are throwing money into the fireplace for fun, well, please reconsider and buy me the following items:
It's not that I'm not flexible. For a 41 year-old, I dare say I am quite flexible, but I ain't talking about dancin'. Way too many things are up in the air for me right now.
One thing that did land squarely on the ground was my internship for next year. I did get the veterinary social work position I was wanting so much. I am very excited about that. I will work there three days a week fall and spring semesters. It's a large university vet clinic so I'll see everything from puppies to alpacas and tigers. There are lots of components to the program, including the obvious counseling for folks who have a tough time with the grief process. It's a very unique opportunity that will probably never come my way again.
I'll also be in class and work 20 more hours part-time (I hope). Our company's benefits are three times more costly when you go part-time, so I will basically be working to provide benefits. That sucks. Hubby is 100 percent commission, so I'm just praying for promptly paying customers. I'll be playing the part of "Guido with the baseball bat" if they don't!
I deal with change okay, but not necessarily instability plus change. Ever since Daddy died I seem to be oversensitive to stress of any kind, which has really frustrated me. I've been moving at a snail's pace ever since.
I am finally starting to paint again, thank God. I couldn't get into the studio until I put some of Daddy's things away in a closet. Now it doesn't hurt so much to go in there. I need to build an inventory of about 40 paintings for a show in November, so I need to get going! I'm still going to have some smaller "warm-ups" for Ebay soon, but for the most part I'll be saving all my work for November. After the show I'll have a bunch up on Ebay (well, hopefully not as many as I took to the show!). I've not been really pleased with the "warm-ups," but part of it is a negative attitude I think. I have a hard time believing I deserve to be in this show, but I reckon' I need to get over that and get busy!
Hope your Monday goes like a Friday today!
So much for getting out and having fun. So much for bringing in the pups to work. So much for...hoark...we interrupted that message for a stomach virus. A really, really ugly one...a porcelain-hugging one. And I don't do porcelain-hugging unless forced against my will. 'Nuff said.
Now I'll be stuck with working on Sunday to meet Monday's deadlines. Yippee. Not to mention doing about eight hours of studying for class. Actually, five or six of those hours have been done thankfully, but I still have a chapter and four essay questions to write up. Bleh.
I'm using vacation time at work to cover the rest of my internship hours, which sucks, but I have a finite amount of energy at the moment. Work is sad, unproductive and stressful right now. I worry about going part-time and I worry that the part-time job I'm waiting for won't be approved and I'll be screwed. More importantly, someone I've worked with for many years is about to lose a parent to illness and the office has become a place of unrest, tears and frustration. I feel for this person who isn't sleeping at all, and who is still trying to fulfill many obligations that, in my opinion, just oughta wait. I really felt bad for missing a day of work when this person could have used my help. I worked as much as I could from home, but I know it would have been better if I had been there. Nothin' I can do about it now.
A couple of months ago I asked my mom, "When does it stop feeling like it was just yesterday?"
She said, "a really long time."
Tomorrow is national Take Your Dog to Work Day
Now, you don't even have to tempt me. It's just that I need to pick who to bring.
or 
Pickles, our 14 year-old, would not be interested in the whole soiree for more than 35.2 seconds, so I'm going to let her get her rest on what is left of the couch (if you missed that post, Pepper ate the couch).
Of course Petey did try to pee on a stack of dog food bags at Pet Supplize Pluz, but I yanked him away before the stream hit the sack...so-to-speak. I had to tell the cashier she had "a clean-up on aisle seven."
Then, Pepper has decided she needs to drag us for walks. We have since tried the "Gentul Leadur"...and, let me just say, it works IMMEDIATELY. Pepper was practically digging up concrete and now she walks with a LOOSE LEASH after ONE WALK. So, if you have a persistent puller, get one of these things...they're worth every penny.
Tonight, I'm off to my first MINI meeting with the Smoky Mountain MINI Club and then it's off to hear Rhett Miller play at Sundown in the City. It should be a fun night. :-)
Toodles, all...and don't forget to contact your legislator about voting for HR 503--the bill that would end horse slaughter in this country.
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