I was listening to NPR and some kid had apparently sent a question about choosing a non-marketable major. Well. I dunno. I had one of those and, in some ways, I should be the last person to talk about this. I am certainly not some kind of big, successful tycoon but I am not just a drudge either. I like a job where I have enough freedom to learn how to be in the middle of it all but not necessarily have the responsibilities of a manager. I’m getting there with my current job. Slowly. But it takes a while. In my life, there have been times that I have wondered what the heck I was doing. And a very dark period (of months, thank god) a few years ago when I couldn’t even figure out what to do with myself to fill up a day. Who was I? Where was I? Clean the basement? I wish…

It’s okay if you are driven to be a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer. And yes, those people do usually make lots of money. What if you aren’t interested in any of those things? What if you are interested in music or acting or art? Okay. So what if you choose to focus on one of those kinds of majors during your college years. What if you don’t really know what you want to do with your life? What happens when you are a senior and Shell Oil isn’t offering you $100K to come work for them immediately in some backwater where the summer temperatures average 110 degrees a day? Is that bad?

Here’s the truth. First, if you *have* focused on a narrow but marketable skill-set in college, yes, you may get a wonderful job right after graduation. That’s great. But what do you want to be doing 20 years later? The Engineer was a talented automotive engineer and jazz musician. He chose the engineering path. Years later, when he was fighting the illness that eventually claimed his life, I believe he wished he’d spent more time playing the trombone.

In the long run, unless you have one singular passion that you are totally, utterly focused on and don’t have any other interests, it almost doesn’t matter what your major is. So what. In life, whatever job you have, the best thing to do is show up. On time, if it matters in your situation. Try to find ways to be busy, find a niche, dig in to how things work, and don’t play politics if you can possibly avoid it. And life is like a river. There are good times and bad and a problem that might seem insurmountable at the moment may be solvable after a good night’s sleep. Or a few weeks/months of research. Time goes on and with each problem, a new opportunity can arise if you are willing to grab it.

Way back before those tubes or whatever they are were actually useful for communication (and I *don’t* consider downloading ASCII art nude girls from the Merit network onto an old dot matrix printer “communication”), I used to occasionally do a little landfill newsletter. I used a computer to type it but I had to print it and put it in envelopes and all that in the old fashioned way. It was kind of fun but I didn’t keep it up very long. I still have those files on my computer in some archaic version of MS Word and I should probably save them in my *current* version of Word before I lose them forever. Anyway. This morning, the power cord to my work computer suddenly started to make a little crackling noise and there was a little smoke. It was very exciting for about five minutes but after that, things slid slowly downhill. Nothing catastrophic. The computer itself is fine, I’m using a borrowed power cord, and a new one is on order. It’s just that I wished I had handled an ongoing situation more proactively from the get-go. It’s a small situation in the grand scheme of things and I will learn from my mistakes. Anyway, here’s a little tidbit from a newsletter I wrote in 1991, when the beach urchins were seven six and almost-fivefour and I worked as a contractor with them thar *beloved* slackers over at the EPA (kidding about slackers, those guys work hard). It reminds me a bit of what happened to my power cord today. Yes, it is wordy. I guess I am still wordy. I try… I titled this item “Back to the Nineties”. Wonder what the heck I was thinking back in 1991…

The number of people who remember life before TV is ever shrinking and as one of them I find it “mindboggling” that my kids have grown up thinking of a computer as just another appliance. For years, I have been watching adults approach computers afraid to touch anything for fear the machine will blow up. Once in 12 years, I have seen a monitor overheat and smoke a little – no one had used it for at least an hour. A car is potentially a far more dangerous machine in the hands of the average computer user and although occasionally someone at work destroys enough data to give me a minor headache, lightning poses a far greater threat than some lowly operator. Usually those most likely to wreak havoc are experienced enough that their fingers go faster than their brains. Kids are a whole nother story. If the computer doesn’t move fast enough for them they bang on the keyboard a while or toggle the power switch on and off a hundred times. Many “educational” programs begin by asking for the kid’s name, a feature which drives Bill and I crazy and on which most kids spend more time than they do on their math problems or whatever. They use just about anything except Dick, Jane, Ashley, Noah, or Sharinda. “M C Hammer” (a rap group) is popular and interesting nonsense letter combinations are also common. One kid has raised it to an art form:

zzzzzzzzzzzz (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzzzzzzzz (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzy (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzy (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzzzzzzzz (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzy (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzzzzzzzz (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzyyzzzzz (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzyyzzzzz (backspace to beginning)
zzzzzyyzzzzz (enter) (whew!)

Zzzzzyyzzzzz is just her first name. Next she gets to do her last name.

Daylight savings time. People were dragging today at work. I wasn’t dragging but I could empathize. When the beach urchins were very small, a one hour change in time managed to knock everybody out of whack for about the next week. Gain an hour? Lose an hour? It didn’t matter. Circadian rhythms were disrupted and people were grumpy for a while until they adjusted.

It wasn’t always bad. Once when the urchins were a little older, we had spent much of the “spring” school break up in the Yoop with The Commander and Grandroobly. We were driving home the Sunday of the time change when Lizard Breath revealed that she was sick. I had already deduced that but I know how it is when you’re just not sure… The GG also succumbed to the virus. Mouse and I didn’t get that virus, at least not that day. After a long ugly day, we got home and the sick people could chill. And Mouse and a friend rode their bicycles up and down our quiet street late into the sunlit evening while I tended to those who were ill. I could see Mouse and her friend out of the corner of my eye and hear their laughter. Life was good and I miss those days…

Now. Hmm. I switch time changes pretty well these days. I gave myself a little half hour pass yesterday morning but I often do that on Sundays anyway. I like that I walk in darkness again in the morning. Except that I have to be ultra vigilant about watching for skunks, who are on the prowl at this time of year. I would prefer that it got dark earlier in the evening. I enjoy that in the winter (yeah, I know I’m nuts) and I’m reluctant to give it up. On the other hand, I *love* when I am up on Fin Family Moominbeach at the time of the summer solstice and I can look out to the horizon at 11:00 PM and can still see just the tiniest bit of light on the horizon.

If you saw my quick update from earlier today, you would know that The Seagulls returned to their Round Island Rookery yesterday, Saturday, March 7, 2009. And that’s my real post for today because that is actual news! But since I can’t shaddup, you get two posts!

Down here in the south, the south of the Great Lake State, that is, we had a dark day of rain on this first day of daylight savings time. It was too rainy/muddy to hike anywhere, so we took the Dogha out for a slow river ride checking out how high the water level is and looking at all the bare black tree branches. If I had been walking along the river, I’d’ve gotten photos of some of the old dead tree carcasses. The ones that began their lives in the last century or maybe even the century before that. Alas, Urine Huron River Drive is not only a scenic road, it is also a commuter route for many people and we’re guessing it was the church commute this morning. I’m not sure Jesus cares if they are on time or wearing the right clothes or whatever. Anyway, the river road is a twisty, turny, hilly, 35-mph, two-lane paved road with no shoulder and therefore it can be dangereuse to stop long enough to take pictures. But I did get a few that I thought were worth posting. Click here or on the pic. Oh yeah, the photo is of the Delhi bridge restoration project. The bridge has been painted (orange) and I’m guessing they are about to put it back into place.

It has rained almost all weekend. It’s fine. We need the rain and I love it. I spent a lot of the afternoon slodging around down in the Dungeon working simultaneously on my fabric stash and my UFP. Somehow those two prodjects (intentionally misspelled) have been intersecting the last few days.

Hope y’all had a good weekend. Love, KW.

Paulette, our northern correspondent from Fin Family Moomintundra, reports that The Seagulls returned to their Round Island rookery yesterday, Saturday, March 7, 2009. The north shall rise again!

With my bank stock, that is. The bank stock that I used to have, that is. Because today, I *finally* managed to get over to the safe deposit box, dredge out those worthless scraps of paper, and send them off. My bank stock was once worth enough to buy myself a new vee-hickle or maybe two. And once, in a fit of rage over being forced to drive a 9-year-old POC seemingly forever, I threatened to sell my stock (yes, *my* stock) and buy a new Honda. One that I could drive to Yooperland without the fear of having to hang out on the side of the I75 SUV Speedway holding a chewed up serpentine belt. Or standing in a pool of power steering fluid. Or oil. Or whatever. Alas. I was pooh-poohed by the resident new car pooh-pooher. And I backed down into my little puddle of I-don’t-bring-home-the-bacon misery.

But you know? I *should* have bought a car. Or better yet, I should’ve cashed the dern things in and put the money under a mattress. But I am lazy. And truthfully, I don’t really pay any serious attention to the stock market. For the most part, the only time I ever thought about my stock was at tax time. So, out of sheer inertia, I held on to the blasted things well into the bank meltdown. Some arrogant executive vice president is cruising somewhere in the Caribbean, wining and dining off the billion dollar bonus he was paid for throwing my money down the toilet.

I don’t really care about the stock. It’s gone. C’est la vie. I wasn’t living off of it. I work for a living. But. Grrrr. Coincidentally, today is also tax day at the Landfill. I *hate* tax day at the Landfill. People and pooh-poohers wander around the house asking me where I’ve hidden pieces of paper that the banks don’t bother to send out any more. Pacing and hoovering and rattling and fidgeting behaviors go on that drive me right smack up the wall. I used to do the Landfill taxes once upon a time. Maybe I should yank them back next year. I’m good at stuff like that and I actually enjoy doing it. I don’t know exactly when the responsibility shifted. Sometime during a whole series of chaotic years of driving kids all over hellangone, I guess. Maybe it was just that after doing the books and taxes for a whole bunch of non-profit organizations, I didn’t have the energy to do all that at home too. Take back the taxes, KW.

And then. Serendipity struck. The UU and The Beautiful Gay and her beautiful sister just happened to be around town, so we walked over to Knight’s and met up with them in the middle of the afternoon. And, even though the sun wasn’t over the yardarm yet, I had whine and the company was wonderful. Thanks fer dragging me outta my spider-hole, you guys!

I am not ready for this! Last weekend? Monday and Tuesday morning? Zero degrees. I had to wear my balaclava and snowpants and a polartech vest under both layers of my ski jacket. Today? I could’ve gotten away with shorts! I didn’t have to go out and start my vee-hickle 10 minutes before I left this morning to get the windows de-iced without scraping. There was no way I could’ve picked up perishable grokkeries at Whole Foods during lunch and left them in my vee-hickle for the afternoon. I have the Landfill kitchen window open. I cannot for the life of me figger why anyone felt as if we needed to turn the furnace up this afternoon. Don’t be envious. I’m sure we’ll be taking the escalator back down into the deep freeze a few more times.

No, the flower is not from today. About the earliest I remember the flowering trees bloom was late April. Right after Mouse was born back in 1987. We still have lumps of blackened snow around here and I haven’t even seen a crocus yet. It’ll be a while. I went in to work early today. So I could leave a little early so we could go to Joan’s funeral. The flower is for her. An album of pictures down at Muehlig’s was filled with pictures of flowers, as was their back yard most of the years that we’ve lived here. By comparison, our back yard is always a weedy, mossy mess.

We never spent a whole lot of time with the neighbors whose house is probably less than 20 feet from ours. But we were friendly and you get to know what people are all about after 25 years. These people were fun. They were all about partying in the back yard. There were all the fireworks “wars” between Chris and the GG back in the day. There was the time Chris helped extract Mouse’s neck from a precarious position between the seats of a broken glider swing (you guys, I was at work when this happened). There was the time the bomb squad came to take the dynamite away. I could go on. There weren’t a whole lot of people at the funeral home when we paid our visit and we didn’t know anyone there. We paid our respects by looking at the afore-mentioned photo album showing our neighbors having fun. Traveling. In their back yard. Wherever. I’ll bet that wherever they are now, they are having a great time again. I, who all those years was always busy busy busy with one career or another and kids and property “up north” and our beloved extended families, think that I will miss them very much. I said this the other day but once again, farewell!

Hum de dum de dum de dum. Standing in the Blue and Only Bathroom at zero-dark-30 getting a new bar of soap out of the linen closet… Hmmm…

Drug Facts

Active ingredient: Triclocarban 0.60%
Purpose: antibacterial

Uses: for washing to decrease bacteria on the skin

Warnings: for external use only

When using this product: avoid contact with eyes. In case of eye contact, flush with water.

Stop use and ask a doctor if: irritation and redness develops.

Keep out of reach of children. If swallowed, get medical help or contact a Poison Control Center right away.

Directions: wet bar with water, lather vigorously and wash skin, rinse and dry thoroughly

And a whole bunch o’ other garbage that’s too long to type.

WTH? People, these are bars of SOAP!!!! I have been more or less successfully using bars of SOAP for over 50 years now. Yes, there are probably people around who are allergic to various brands of soap. I bet that this kind of allergy is not *usually* life-threatening and anyone with a brain would maybe just try another brand of soap? Roight? Children. Yes. Children put things in their mouths sometimes. Ever taste a bar of soap? Yuck, right? I know how it tastes, I have a clear memory of tasting it in early childhood. I doubt that I swallowed any of it. Because it tastes *horrible*.

I dunno. How the HECK did our society get to the point where so many folks are without food and shelter but we somehow have the cash to pay somebody to write instructions for how to use a blasted bar of soap! Not to mention that the people who most likely need that kind of basic education will probably be the least likely to READ the blasted fine print. Or even have the reading skills to read it.

Do YOU need instructions for using soap?

I have no further words. Good night.

Oh, c’mon, it’ll be fun! And it was fun. But. It was a usability association event and my boss wanted to go and all of us on the team are association members but most of us turn into pumpkins not too long after the work day ends, so dragging us out at night is not easy. I shouldn’t really speak for the others on my team but we’re known as the geriatric group so you can just figger. A couple of us replied that we would be up for it as a group, i.e., none of this solo stuff. When you attend something like that alone, you have to schmooze and we all are not particularly crazy about schmoozing. I’m not sure it bothers the boss but he is a rather singular person (don’t ask). But yaknow, we are all computer-type people. We sit in nice clean, quiet cubicles and read and write code and very very specific specifications for how web pages, et al, should will work. I mean, we can blather on about what we’re doing at great length. The problem is, who the heck would want to hear about it? And the *rest* of my life — including my employment history — is just so weird, I never know where the heck to start!

So each one of us, all on our own, managed to arrive “fashionably” late. You know. To minimize the schmoozing time before the presentation. And wouldn’t you know? Of all people, *I*, yer own favo-rite blahgger, ended up schmoozing a bit. With a very talented young woman that I once did a school project with and a couple other people. And I managed to avoid another er, not-so-talented young woman that I managed to avoid doing school projects with.

I will have to figger out some schmoozing strategies. Maybe it’s just that we’re *all* standing around looking awkward. It’s easiest for me to talk to strangers when I am *doing* something. Besides looking awkwardly around and twiddling my thumbs, that is. If I can do something constructive with my camera and/or laptop and/or iPhone or whatever, I have a role and I can either watch silently from my geeky little perch or engage anyone with questions about me without me having to be the center of focus. Er, not that most of the people at tonight’s event don’t have similar types of technology available to them… Or difficulties with schmoozing… Or… Hmm, maybe we need to redesign these events to make them more, well, you know, usable. Organize things so that people interact without having to work at it. How… I’m thinking and I am not thinking about those darn ice-breaker games. Those don’t work for those of us who just want to be *home* in the evening. At least not for me.

Do y’all like to schmooze? Or not? If you do, what are your strategies? If you don’t, well, how do you manage these events? Or are you a natural?

Or almost. Actually, we weren’t even in our initial stages of house-hunting at this time 25 years ago. We were living in a nice two bedroom apartment over on Jackson and we were trying (or not) to get pregnant. Well. Try? How ’bout drop of the hat? The “or not”? Terrified!!! At 30!!! Sheesh!! But it was all right and I *think* I did okay with my babies, despite the fact that I hadn’t ever even changed a diaper in my whole life until my own first baby was born.

I think that later in March of that year, when I *knew* that I was pregnant, we were looking at houses. I didn’t have a blahg then so I can’t look it up. We were shown three houses on our first go ’round. I wasn’t thrilled with the first two. We turned onto Landfill Drive here and I wasn’t thrilled with *this* house either. Until I walked into it enough to see that there was a large “back room” and a big back yard and a *woods* behind it. How many times can you say woods? $65K? Happy dance? Yes. Okay. $65K was scary in those days. Yes, it was. Who knew.

We bought it hook line and sinker and our neighbors on both sides at that time were probably about the ages we are now. They were intelligent, vibrant folks with responsible jobs and social networks that spanned the world. Three days after Grandroobly died in 2006, Chris next door died, after years of worsening health problems. I think that more than anything, Joan missed her husband so terribly that she couldn’t go on. Today I read in the newspaper that she died. She fell in her driveway late last summer. We were out of town. Thankfully, people are always walking dogs, etc., in our neighborhood and she didn’t have to wait long for help. Unfortunately, so often a fall signals the end of life for an older person who doesn’t necessarily have anything they want to live for any more. She lingered for a while in an upscale assisted living place but in the end…

We don’t spent a whole lot of time with our neighbors but we are always friendly. I hope whoever ends up there next fits in to this odd little block of people who move in and stay forever.

So long, Joan. We *will* miss you.

I am taaaarrrrred. Yaknow, we are prob’ly outta town two out of five weekends. That’s an unscientific guesstimate but we are out of town a lot. And I’m not even counting the weekends that we make day trips over to kzoo to watch plays and things. Heck, kzoo is only 100 miles away and we don’t leave the southern Great Lake State to get there. So we haven’t left home. Roight?

The problem is that every time we go out of town for the weekend, it seems like it takes me most of the next week to sort of get back into the swing of things. I mean, I can get into the swing of my work. But I usually have no recognizable food in the house and no grokkery list and so I end up making gazillions of trips to various grokkery stores to get various dribs and drabs of whatever I don’t have in the house. And we won’t even talk about the clutter and dust and vacuuming, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

And this week, I have to fit the post office and the blasted *bank* into my commute. I mean, I have to mail the g-d jury duty questionnaire that came on Saturday, which means I might as well take the back roads to work because the post office takes me four or five stoplights away from the freeway entrance and I do *not* want to go back through that gauntlet. So it’ll take me twice as long to get to work. And then I have to dredge some crap out of my safe deposit box at what used to be my bank and I don’t have any idea when I’m gonna do that because I get to work before the bank opens and leave after it closes!!! And yes, I *can* leave work to go and do that. But my blasted bank (or what used to be my bank) is within walking distance of my house and leaving work to go to the bank means driving almost all the way home and back again in the middle of the day. Which is a total waste of time and petroleum. Grrrr-umph.

Enough! Life is not as bad as I’m making it sound, knock on wood big-time! Have a good evening! Love, KW.

Yes. Today was the day. There’s also Crabby Lobster Day (my favo-rite because of the “crabby”, roight?) and I think there’s a pig roast and I fergit what else.

A few years ago, we went to another Cajun Gumbo day at the ski ranch. We met up with The Engineer (aka my brother who is now hanging out on the other side) and Dogmomster and their beach urchins, Valdemort and Pengo. We ate gumbo and we posed for pictures that I don’t have time to post today and we listened to a wonderful high school jazz band while we ate. It was a festival at the end of winter (er, don’t tell Ol’ Man Winter I said that) and the weather was warm and the skiing wasn’t all that great because it was spring conditions, which aren’t great for XC but we all had fun anyway.

Sometimes, we would be up at Houghton Lake back in the old days when the beach urchins were young and we had to pump water at our old cabin hazardous waste site in the winter and whatever. We would go out skiing and we would end up at the ski ranch and we would be surprised to see The Engineer!!! Who had made a surprise trip to the ski ranch with Dogmomster and the girls and Sam (dog, not archaeologist). Cousins would squeak with glee at the unexpected chance to play in the snow with each other and. Well. I dunno.

I miss those days. They were happy times and they will never come back, at least not in that form. But we have learned to pay our happy times forward, I think. We have to, despite days like today when I spent the whole day thinking back to an earlier year at Cajun Gumbo day. We have to go forward. It’s our only choice. And I am convinced that it’s what The Engineer would want us to do. Love you, ol’ boy, wherever you are.

* Ski Ranch = XC Ski HQ Mouse made up the ski ranch name when she was maybe about four.