Current events

This has become a Friday night routine. I tentatively approach a thing that resembles an idea for a post, and then I circle it for a while, poking it with a stick, to see if it tries to bite me or anything. And then I just write about whatever nonsense pops into my head. Like a week in review.  Yes, that's it!  Week in review! Why didn't I think of that before?

*****

Monday: Sadly, Amy Krouse Rosenthal died on Monday, after a long illness. I wrote about her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life on my 2016 book list. I had no idea that she was sick (or that she had written children's books) until the New York Times published her "You May Want to Marry My Husband" essay on March 3.  She was a great writer and, obviously and more importantly, a great person.
Monday night: A tense evening as the heavily hyped forecast of snow appeared for a while to have been mistaken (or a hoax). The snow finally began to fall, prompting an early snow day call from the school district--the first one this winter. All-out Lord of the Flies rebellion: Narrowly averted. 

Tuesday: Snow day. 

Tuesday night: You know, Rachel, I turned off a hockey game to watch that, nearly sparking an another potential uprising. These are revolutionary times at my house. I'm not sure that "Donald Trump paid some taxes in 2005" was quite the truth-to-power Watergate-level scoop that we all hoped for.  PS--I think Trump leaked the return himself. 

Wednesday: I don't even remember.  It was four days ago! Oh wait, I remember.  I worked from home on Tuesday.  Snow and whatnot. So I sent myself some files, because my work computer is huge and unwieldy, and no matter how many times I readjust my hands on the keyboard, I can't type on the thing.  I worked like a madwoman all day.  Then, on Wednesday morning, I got to my desk and realized that I didn't have the computer that I had used on Tuesday, and that I had forgotten to email the file back to myself. Kind of a problem, because it was kind of an important thing with kind of a hard, immovable, drop-dead, not one minute late deadline.  Something of a dilemma.

All's well that ends well. My husband was on the late shift this week, and being home, he was able to email the file to me.  Then, I stopped at the grocery store on the way home, only to realize that I'd left my wallet at home, too. At least I hadn't actually shopped yet. Because I'd have been SO MAD.

Thursday:  A long work day, but I didn't mind.  The Friday deadline still looming, I stayed at my desk until 6:30, and then came home and worked until a little after 10.

Friday: Deadline met.

Saturday: I hate to shop, as I mentioned here.  The benefit of working full-time is that I can afford to shop; the disadvantage, of course, is that I don't have time to shop.  Or rather, I do have time, but my time is limited, and shopping is my very least favorite way to spend it.  So I buy clothes online. And then I wear them, and hate them, and end up with a pile of nearly new stuff that languishes in my closet, while I tear my hair out every morning because I have nothing to wear.

But wait.  We're not talking about every morning.  We're talking about today. I went shopping, in a real store, where I tried some things on, and even bought a few items. Or articles.  We'll see what happens. That was the least fun thing that I did all week.  Note that this was a week that included floor mopping, snow shoveling, tax paying, and insomnia, so do the proverbial math.

*****
It's still Saturday, a few hours later.  Do you know what's happening right now? My son, who is 15  years and 9 months old today, is watching the Maryland Motor Vehicles Administration's how to get your driver's license video. No matter what time it is, it's always later than you think. Or later than I think, anyway.

And speaking of math? 100 Concepts is veering off the rails into pure ridiculousness .  Now I'm supposed to believe that there's such a thing as a three-dimensional one-sided shape. Fiction, I tell you.

Early in the evening, we went to our favorite neighborhood Mexican restaurant, with this boy and his mother (my sister-in-law) and his baby sister, who slept through the entire meal. The hostess was the senior co-captain of my son's high school swim team, and as high school kids often do when they see each other in non-school settings, they pretended that they didn't know each other.  Perhaps my son, who had ridden with my sister-in-law so that he could help with the children, was embarrassed to be seen carrying a sleeping infant in a forty-pound carrier.  Perhaps the girl, who is normally rather stylish, was embarrassed to be seen in her work uniform of khaki pants and a polo shirt.

I'm glad I'm not in high school anymore. Because it would be awkward to be the teenage mother of two teenage boys.

*****
It's Sunday morning now. I'm the only person awake, and I'm watching "Stranger than Fiction," a movie that I really love. I might like Will Ferrell even better in dramatic roles than in comedies. His "Stranger than Fiction's" character's favorite is work, not smiling. And Emma Thompson, Queen Latifah, and Maggie Gyllenhaal (sp?) are great as they always are.  It's good to be up early.

Did you not get the work/smiling reference?  Then go and watch "Elf," right away.

After Mass, I'll be attending a Lularoe home boutique show with some friends. No good will come of this, I promise you. With money in my pocket and the encouragement of well-meaning but misguided friends (both of whom are teachers, which means that actual toddler clothing is acceptable work attire for them), I'll end up with a pile of stretchy polka-dotted sack dresses, peacock-feather printed leggings, and a floppy hat.  With the right pair of Birkenstocks, I can show up at my job as a technical writer at a federal government contractor looking like a jewelry vendor at Lollapalooza, circa 1994.

Maybe I should leave my wallet at home.

I look ridiculous? You're wearing
cupcake-patterned
 leggings. Dumb ass. 

Later, I'm making chicken for dinner, using a video recipe recommended by another friend. The recipe involves a chicken and a Bundt pan, and like every other Internet chicken recipe, it suggests an insanely optimistic cooking time. (Hey!  That was exactly a year ago!) A food writer who believes that a whole chicken stuffed into a Bundt pan and surrounded by lemons and vegetables can go into a 425 degree oven and then come out ready to eat just 55 minutes later has obviously never cooked a chicken, but the friend who recommended the recipe is usually a dependable source of household and cooking advice. Only one way to find out.  Maybe I'll post a cooking diary next week. Don't say you weren't warned.

Current events

I work from home.  When my husband is at work and my kids are at school, the house is sometimes too quiet, so I keep the TV on, on low volume, because the background noise is helpful.  I'm usually tuned to MSNBC, alternating occasionally with the local all-news channel.

Even though I don't actually watch most of the time (I usually sit with my back to the TV), the talk still enters my brain, which means that I know more about politics right now than I necessarily want to.  I was shocked last week when my husband, commenting on the New Hampshire primary results, asked me who John Kasich was.   He's an intelligent and reasonably well-informed person, but he'd never heard of John Kasich; didn't even know that he was running.  

Right now, MSNBC and every other news network are covering the death of Antonin Scalia and the emerging fight over whether or not the President should appoint a replacement and whether or not the Senate will allow a nomination to come to a vote.  Anyone who wonders why most Americans now hate both parties needs only to watch five minutes' worth of Scalia coverage.  The poor guy's body probably isn't even cold yet, and the politicking is fully underway. 

I'm on both sides of this issue.  As a pro-life person, I don't necessarily want to see another Obama appointee to the Supreme Court; however, I also don't think that the Supreme Court is actually that important.  The misbegotten idea of abortion as some sort of human right took hold over a period of 50 years or so.  People who still believe that abortion is anything except a horror for women and for humanity aren't going to change their minds because of a court decision or a political fiat.   

On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that President Obama, who has almost a year more to serve, should appoint Scalia's replacement. It is also manifestly and transparently obvious that if the current lame-duck President were a Republican and not a Democrat, then Cruz, Kasich, Rubio and the rest of them would be vigorously defending that President's right to appoint the next Justice, and would be asserting his Constitutional responsibility to do so with dispatch.  And, in that very same hypothetical case, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the rest of THAT gang would be expressing fake outrage over the supposed power grab of a sitting President making a judicial appointment and would similarly threaten to delay, filibuster, or otherwise stymie the process.

I don't remember exactly when the term "litmus test" began to be used in discussions of judicial appointees' views on abortion.  Sometime in the 1980s, I think.  I also don't recall having heard of a litmus test applied to any judicial nominee's views on eminent domain, say, or Fifth Amendment rights, or interstate commerce, or even gun rights.  Only for abortion, it seems, are both sides, but especially the pro-choice side, so determined to try to guess the potential candidates' views to be sure that they'll vote the right way.  On the pro-choice side, I think, it's because there's no other way to sustain the whole monstrous lie--that abortion is about women's rights, or that a fetus is anything other than a human being--than to prop it up with phony "settled law," ideally by appointing young judges who are likely to sit on the bench for the next 20 years or so.  Then keep sharpening the "choice" and "war on women" rhetoric during that 20 years, and hopefully, you'll fool just enough people that the next generation will produce politicians who will do what's necessary to sustain the lie for the next 20 years or so after that. 

Right now, on social media, smug pro-choicers are circulating a meme that reads something like "Justice Scalia expressed a wish to be cremated; however, women will need to meet first to decide if that's what's really best for his body." Hilarious!  Gotcha!  I really NAILED those idiot pro-lifers this time; they can't argue with that!  Except for this: Justice Scalia is already dead, and abortion, of course involves two bodies, not just one, both of which are alive, at least until Planned Parenthood gets hold of them.  Right-wing social media friends are just as bad; they're flooding Facebook with rumors that Scalia was murdered by nefarious pro-choicers and gay rights activists.  Sleep with one eye open, Justices Thomas, Alito, and Roberts, because I suppose you're all next. 

And that leads right back to what's wrong with politics right now.  Nothing can be solved with politics, because politics is about nothing but politics, and no one on either side actually cares about truth.  The people in power care only about holding onto power, and the fight is about only the fight.  The politicians all know this and they have known it for some time.  Unfortunately for them, people are beginning to catch on.  Unfortunately for all of us, the people who are catching on are in reaction mode; nothing else can explain the rise of Donald Trump.  Maybe it will take two years, or maybe five, but it's entirely likely that sometime in the not-all-that-distant future, the debate over Supreme Court appointments and filibusters will seem quaintly nostalgic, because the Constitution and the United States as we know them now won't even exist.   Or maybe I just need to get out more. 

Interior design

I just saw a televised tour of El Chapo's hideout.  It looked like a 27-year-old software engineer's apartment.  White walls, unadorned by anything other than a wall-mounted flat screen TV; beige, builder's grade carpet; a brown microfiber living-room suite, with the couch, love seat, and overstuffed chair pushed up against the bare white walls; and a bedroom furnished with a bare mattress and box-spring set, with a pile of pillows and blankets that looked like they'd been recently slept on or under.  Pizza boxes, newspapers, and DVDs were strewn about.  Minus the bullet holes, the place looked like it belongs in a garden apartment complex in Reston.

Maybe El Chapo should consider a career change.  Defense contractors in the DMV are always hiring engineers. He'd have to settle for $100,000 or so a year, rather than $100 million, but his apartment would be just as nice as the one he just vacated, and he'd be able to leave home once in a while without a disguise.  And it's not likely that Sean Penn would come around pestering him, either.  Something to think about.

Don't cry for me, Argentina

Today was a surprisingly productive day.  I crossed a larger-than-expected number of things off my unrealistically long to-do list, kept work on deadline, and serendipitously timed my swim to end at the very moment the thunder rumbled, prompting the lifeguard to whistle swimmers out of the pool.  Success on every front.

Not every day is like this, because I have the attention span of a fruit fly.  Yesterday, for example, I was working peacefully as clean clothes tumbled in the dryer. When the timer buzzed, I got up to fold the clothes, then I noticed some dirt on the family room floor, so I abandoned a t-shirt mid-fold and plugged in the vacuum cleaner.  As I vacuumed, I wondered what the family room would look like if I moved furniture piece A to spot B, and then furniture piece B into spot A.  It didn't work as well as I thought it would, so I moved the furniture back to where it had been.  Not, however, before vacuuming the spots where the pieces had been, and then moving a few other furniture items to vacuum underneath,

Back to work.  But wait, the clothes weren't folded!

The report that I was copyediting contained a discussion of a country whose fiscal position is untenable; however, that country continues to increase spending and cut taxes ahead of looming elections.  The day of reckoning will come, I suppose.  As I worked, I thought that I saw a metaphor for my life amid the talk of debt-to-GDP ratios and impending fiscal collapse.  I should have written it down, but at just that moment, I noticed some dirt on the kitchen floor.  The kitchen floor, once clean, made the countertops look pretty squalid by comparison.  By the time I had brought the countertops up to my standard, the metaphoric connection between my life and a South American economic disaster, which was already tenuous to begin with, had evaporated altogether.  All wasn't lost, though.  The laundry was done, the kitchen was pretty clean, and I met my deadline.  South America should be so lucky.

 

Transition

It's almost dark at 8:04 PM.  We have weeks of warm weather left, but only a few days before school starts and 10 days or so before the pool closes and summer, by my definition, is firmly and finally over.

I predicted months ago that I'd be sitting on the couch one late-August night, sadly wondering where the summer had gone, but I'm actually not as sad as I usually am.  After a week of vacation and another few days of little work, I'm ready for a return to a more structured schedule. I don't manage unstructured time very well.  I'll miss my kids, though.  I could reconcile myself to the end of summer if I didn't have to send them back to school.  As for homeschooling, see earlier reference to unstructured time.  Left solely in my educational care, my children would have read hundreds of novels and spent many hours swimming and playing music.  They would also be unable to count past ten.  I know my limits.

******

It's 8:45 AM now.  Today's really the last day of summer, REAL summer.  High school orientation is tomorrow morning at 7:45, which means that I need to wake a 14-year-old up at 6:45.  I'm always up early anyway, but being up myself and dragging sleepy teenagers out of their beds are two entirely different things.  School doesn't start in earnest until Monday, but once a kid enters a school building at 7:45 in the morning and returns home with reams of forms for me to sign, the spell is broken.   And now, it's time to work.

Off-task

Well, that's no way to build an audience, is it?  After several weeks of stunning circulation figures (as many as 40 readers in a day!) production levels dropped to zero posts per week.  I shall have to account to my superiors for my lack of productivity.

Today has been something of an exercise in futility.  I've found that multi-tasking is far overrated; however, the habit of trying to do multiple things at once is so deeply ingrained that I can't break it now.  Just during the course of this post, I've clicked over to other tabs at least five times; I'm working on vacation-house searching (note: don't start looking for a beach house for August in June) and finishing a weekly newsletter.  Mild OCD and extreme ADD are not a good combination.  I'm always on task; it's usually just the wrong task.  Back to work.

You can't make some people happy

Those people being me, of course.  Just two days ago, I felt overwhelmed with work, not sure how I'd fit everything I needed to do this week into this actual week.  Just like that, though, some incoming work was delayed, and now I'm at a loss.

I learn something new every day, and one of the things that I'm just now learning about working from home as a contractor is to always have a back-up plan.  Not necessarily a back-up plan for making more money (although that, possibly, would not be a bad idea) but a plan for how to spend time set aside for work when the work fails to materialize.

A long to-do list, no matter how overwhelming, is pretty easy for me to manage.  Unscheduled blocks of time, however, are another matter altogether. In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape explains to Wormwood that his job as a demon is to take a person's soul and to give as little as possible in return.  The demon's goal is to make the victim realize, far too late, that he wasted his life doing neither what he should have been doing nor what he wanted to do.  This is what I'm afraid of, every time I have unscheduled, un-spoken-for time.

This too shall pass, and probably much faster than I want it to.  Meanwhile, I have more work coming in tomorrow, but I think that I need two lists: What to Do if the Work Comes in on Schedule and What to Do if it Doesn't.  Foiled again,Wormwood. Foiled again.