First off: thanks for the "non-flying squirrel" comment, Charles, it actually made me laugh on a morning I was otherwise in a bad mood.

And I am. Part of it is just that it's hot, it's humid, it won't rain, we're trapped under a "dome of high pressure" that is as insidious as anything Dr. Evil could dream up. And part of it is, I just need to stop watching the news again. Here are three stories from the morning local newscast:

1. "BREAKING NEWS! A developing story!" Some actor from a series of gross-out movies that I have never seen has gone into rehab. Breaking news? SRSLY?

2. One of the Kardashian women is upset because a woman was seen breast-feeding in a restaurant. I'm guessing because that meant people were paying attention to someone else's breasts for a change. (I have problems with people CHANGING THEIR BABIES at restaurant tables, which, yes, I've seen. But breast-feeding? Yeah, yeah, I know: some women go to the restroom to do it. But they really shouldn't have to). Again, this is breaking news?

3. If you're anxious, you are going to get heart disease! But don't worry about it, now!

Oh, and another: women who have passed menopause are supposed to give up tea and start drinking coffee lest they develop rheumatoid arthritis. Which, once again, gives me the feeling of "Take away everything I love, everything that brings me joy, in the supposed name of enhancing my health." What it means is I have about 8 years left to enjoy tea, I guess.

Then, the capper: driving in to work, I was very nearly run off the road by some IDIOT who was driving in the MIDDLE of the barely-two-lanes of road I have to go up to get to my workplace. There's something somewhat despair-generating about realizing that you might just buy the farm on your way to work. Instead of, I don't know, trying to climb K2 or chasing tornadoes or something.

I mean, I tend to be highly risk-averse - I don't think I could skydive. And beyond that, I do my [expletive deleted] hour of [expletive deleted] exercise every morning instead of sleeping in like I'd really like to do. And I avoid eating some things I'd really like to eat, and often eat things that really aren't the things I want. All in the name of health. And I do what I'm "supposed" to. I'm so reliable that if my car is not in the lot when the secretary arrives, she assumes I'm home sick. I've never bounced a check or cheated on my taxes.

And yet, I might be taken out by some jerk who can't pay attention to the road because he's both talking on his cell phone AND has the woman in the seat next to him talking to him. Something just seems very wrong about that. I know life isn't fair, but I don't like feeling like driving in to work in my teeny little town should put me in Mortal Peril.

Well, all I got done knit-wise yesterday was maybe four rows on a sock heel.

After teaching all day (on campus from 7 until after 3), I had a long evening meeting (the good news is, we voted in favor of bringing in the best candidate to be our new minister, and we can pay him pretty much what he was asking for).

Today, I give an exam (am typing one right now for another class...which I really need to get back to). Then at noon is a meeting that will probably be more a time-suck than a benefit. Then I teach lab. Then I have the town beautification council meeting this afternoon.

So, no giving blood for me, even if I knew it would be more than 56 days before the church blood drive. I simply don't have time. I will not be free for long enough between 10 and 4 to get in and give blood.

So, if anyone gets on me for not doing "day of service" stuff, I'm going to point out that very frequently my regular days are "days of service." Srsly, the volunteer work I do, like, every month (every week, for that matter) should count. Just because I "already" do it shouldn't make me have to take on something more.

And, here is another of my frustrations with the modern world, and how we get preached at: you never hear that what you are doing is "enough." There always can be more productivity. You can always eat more servings of vegetables in a day. You can always do another 10 minutes of exercise. You can always give more money to charity.

And there HAS to be a point where you say, wait, darn it, I'm already doing pretty well.

For once, for STINKING once, I'd like to hear a doctor tell me, "Wow, that's great, how much exercise you do." or "Good on you for making an effort to eat healthfully." Or hear some person on one of the groups I belong to go, "You know, you really do do an awful lot of volunteer work." But instead, I constantly get asked for, or told to, do more. More more more more more. And I'm tired of it.

I suspect that a lot of the "guidelines" of stuff are upped to keep the people making the guidelines in business: if we all dutifully choked down our nine servings of daily vegetables, they'd tell us to eat 12. Or if we all exercised for 2 hours a day, they'd propose two-and-a-half.

(And I think of tithing: God only asks for 10%. But when charities ask me for money and I say, "Okay, I can give $40," they press for $60.)

Perhaps I'm feeling irked about this because we are in the middle of writing the many assessment reports we are expected to write every year, and seeing how the requirements of what must be put in and documented goes up every year, without some of the requirements being removed...

I'm cranky this morning.

A big part of it was that I took part in A Volunteer Effort last night and as I was the youngest/most able-bodied (there was another woman not that far off my age, but she dislocated her shoulder a week or so ago) person, I wound up doing most of the heavy lifting. So now my shoulders hurt, because a lot of it was not just lifting, it was lifting and HOLDING or lifting over my head.

It's also still hot - or perhaps I should say, hot again, here. Somehow heat indexes of 110* feel hotter now than they did earlier this summer.

I also received AN IMPORTANT DOCUMENT that I must read in a Word 2007 format - after having expressly told the sender I still have Word 2003 and cannot open 2007 documents. I tried downloading the "compatability pack" but it's giving me an error message. And I'm loath to screw too much with my computer. So I'm going to have to go down to the student computer lab with it on my flashdrive to read it. Argh.

(ETA: it was a letter stating, "If you have official acceptance of your paper, congratulations. Otherwise, please get the revisions in by such and such a date." No new information. Here I thought - from the tone of the e-mail accompanying it - it was going to be something like a "sign this form to sign copyright over to us" or one of the other bits of boilerplate without which a paper cannot be published. Well, that was a waste of five minutes.)

I'm also cranky because - well, I just need to stop listening to local news, because this morning it featured both "Oh noes! Women should eat NO MORE THAN 100 calories worth of sugar in a day!!" (hello? Does that include sugar like naturally occurs in fruit, or sugar like what you put in coffee or tea?). Of course, men get a whole 50 calories extra. What? I'm taller and more muscular than some of the men I know, yet they're allowed more sugar just by virtue of their Y chromosome? It's not fair.

I am so flipping sick and tired of every day being told that yet one more of the little comforts of life is going to kill me dead and it's somehow my duty to avoid it. We'll all look pretty stupid for having scourged and flagellated ourselves, and run five miles a day, when an asteroid hits the earth in 2014 or whatever and takes us all out.

Just you wait. They will find some way to make reading hazardous to your health. Or doing crafts. Or singing in church. Or something.

The other thing that makes me cranky is that there's a big scandal in a police department in a city to the west of me. And one of the local news channels thinks it's cool to show how bad this scandal is by having one of their reporters camp out in the offices of the police department for like five minutes of nearly-dead air just looking at the door that's been slammed in her face.

I maintain that local news could be cut down to a 15 minute segment - the local headlines, weather, and maybe sports scores- and cut out all the junk, and then show 45 minutes of cartoons for the rest of the time that's devoted to local news, and we'd all be happier.

Except cartoons are probably bad for your health.

If I trusted the Weather Channel's forecasts (I don't; they're often wrong for my area) I'd just watch them.

Argh. The local "news" reports aggravate me sometimes.

There was a stabbing in my town night before last. And the guy who did it is apparently on the loose. Now, it's true, 90% of these kind of things, it's that the victim and the perpetrator know each other and have some kind of history - a feud, a drug deal gone bad, the victim testified against the perpetrator - something.

But thinking about the Gaffney, South Carolina serial-killer (who was killed by police in a standoff over the weekend), and the fact that no information along the lines of "the killer knew the suspect," I'm a little worried.

One of the local channels did a brief story, and at the end noted that there had been a SECOND stabbing in town, last night. And then they showed the "stock footage" they do for a developing story, the street-signs for the street intersection nearest to where the crime happened.

This second stabbing happened one street to the east, and two streets up, of the intersection I live near. Close to me. Too close.

No other information - no "police do not think the two crimes are linked," no "family members are being held for questioning," nothing.

So I flipped over to the OTHER local news channel.

And watched. And waited. And began to twitch.

Oh, you might be relieved to know that Michael Jackson is still dead. And that his family is still fighting over custody of his kids. And that that NFL player was killed by the girlfriend he was cheating on his wife with, because she suspected he was cheating on her with someone else. Oh, and OH NOES OBESITY! More Americans are fat than ever were before. And the poor economy is leading more people to abandon pets in shelters. Oh, and if you live alone, you're lots more likely to develop Alzheimer's, apparently.

NONE OF THIS IS NEWS.

What I WANT to know is this: is it safe for me to leave my house, or will I be set upon by someone with a knife?

Not a WORD breathed of that. Then they shifted to a segment advertising a local "oxygen bar" (the heck?).

So, I took a deep breath, opened the door, walked to my garage, and got my car out. Obviously I was not stabbed or I would not be writing this.

But it FRUSTRATES me: is not the point of having a "local" channel to broadcast news that is happening "locally"? If I wanted to hear extended speculation on Jackson's estate, or discussion of 20 year olds who date married football players, or scaremongering health news: well, there's CNN, and CNN headline, and MSNBC, and Fox News, and I think a couple of others?

So I don't know. I felt the same way a couple of years ago when we were having regular escapes from the local county jail (which is about 7 blocks from me the opposite direction of where the stabbing this morning was).

And I will observe this is one of those times where I'm not so nuts about living alone: oh, don't get me wrong, I think sharing a house with another person would mostly drive me nuts. But when there's some danger lurking, it would be kind of nice to have someone else around - and again, I realize that "someone else," no matter how big or how strong he might be would not be much help against an armed intruder, still, there's something to be said for someone kind of knowing (more or less) where you are, and whether you might be in Mortal Peril or not.

(Hm. Maybe we need to get a series of Weasley-clocks for my department chair so she could know where each of us was, at least as regards the Mortal Peril part of it.)

Other than that: Yesterday was one of those 12-hour days. Taught all morning, had a brief break to inhale lunch and prep lab, then went out into the field yesterday afternoon with students, then had a loooooooooooong evening meeting.

I do not like summer Wednesdays.

This is the kind of thing that makes me all stabby, first thing on a Saturday morning: a company that is selling "corrupted" files students can buy, then e-mail to their profs, and then student innocently goes, "What? You mean the file wouldn't open?" and (so the student thinks) buys himself/herself some extra time to write the assignment they slacked off on.

That is so full of wrongness....

first of all, I can tell, I would say, 80%-90% of the time, when a paper was written at the very last minute - which is what any student taking advantage of that site is going to be doing. Last-minute papers just have a certain "smell" to them.

second, it assumes profs are sufficiently clueless (or overworked) that we are not going to clue into the situation - I bet some profs receive three or four of these for a single assignment, they're going to figure something's up.

third, how hard would it be for someone to do this on their own? I'm no computer whiz but I suspect it's not that hard to do. (For that matter: find someone who has WordPerfect or some archaic word processing software and do it in that, chances are prof won't be able to open the file, or you can make off that it's a software mismatch).

fourth, it's CHEATING.

fifth, if a student has a major real problem, most profs are amenable to extensions. I know I am. I've even given an occasional extension for the "I really don't have a big life issue going on, but I'm just underwater in terms of all the work I have to do for all my classes." I'd rather grant an honest extension than have someone dishonestly e-mail me a fake file.

sixth, it is not a "good excuse." It is enabling people to procrastinate.

seventh, the assumption that profs don't talk to one another, that word of this thing won't get out, and that people won't be busted.

I don't accept e-mailed papers, except in dire circumstances (like, the person is trapped at home by bad weather). And then, if I can't open the file, they don't get credit. Simple as that. And now I have a good reason to put in my syllabi why I don't accept e-mailed papers. Or at the very least, to put in, "If I can't open the file, your grade drops by five points for every fifteen minutes that elapse between my e-mailing you "I CAN'T OPEN THE FILE" and your sending me one that WILL open")

And yes, on the rare occasions that a student e-mails me an assignment, I try opening it immediately. If it won't, I e-mail them right back and say, "The file did not work" and let them know they need to fix it, stat, if they want credit.

I HATE how we have this arms-race going with the cheaters. Many profs (I know, because I'm in this boat and many of my colleagues I've talked to this about are too) never cheated in school, and so some of the more esoteric cheating methods are ones we'd never even think of. It's infuriating how much time it can take - googling "key phrases" in papers to see if they're plagiarized off the internet, cross-checking all student papers (which is a challenge in big classes) to be sure there isn't a "Hey, you do the work and we'll all copy off of you" ring going on, dealing with cell phones and text devices on exam days (rule: they stay off and in the person's bag. If I see one, it needs to be surrendered to me for the rest of the exam time).

I don't buy the originator's claim that professors find it "funny" and let the students get away with it. I wouldn't. And I bet most employers, if they needed a White Paper or a spreadsheet or a TPS report or something by a certain time, would only find it funny in the sense that they get to laugh while they fire the person, if the person sent them a corrupted file instead.

I wonder how long before someone develops a company that will embed a hard-drive-destroying virus in a fake file, so students can "fry" the computers of profs who don't have up to date virus software? 'Cos I could totally see someone thinking that was a good idea.

I have to talk today about one of those little modern annoyances. I know at least some of you are dealing with it as well. And while it is a MINOR annoyance, compared to disease or famine or other issues those of us who have a decent income and live in the developed world don't really have to deal with too much, it is still one of those things that drives me crazy.

Because it is something that should NOT be. It completely destroys my ability to accept, Professor Pangloss-like, that this is the "best of best possible worlds." It intrudes upon my free time, shatters my concentration, and makes me angry.

It is, if you haven't guessed already, those poxy plaguey pre-recorded calls selling either extended car warranties, or warning that the interest rate on credit cards is about to go up.

I KNOW these are scams. You do not need to tell me. I am on the Federal Do Not Call list, which means that the ONLY businesses allowed to call me should be ones with whom I already do business, charities, and political organizations. (Oh, and poll-takers.) So I figure any business that is breaking the law (granted, a law lacking in any teeth whatsoever) and that is going DIRECTLY against the wishes of a particular person (because honestly, how much more clearly can you say "I do not want to be cold-called at home" than by putting your name on that list?) has to be doing business in an illegal manner.

I also figure it must be like that old Nigerian 419 scam - enough people fall for it, enough people are foolish enough to send money in, to make it profitable to keep going. (Fools. And they are making it worse for the rest of us. The tragedy of the commons, indeed.)

I get three or four of these a week, sometimes more, sometimes one or two a day for a while. Most of the time they come when I'm not home and click over to my voice mail, where I typically delete them upon the first few words of the message. (though that may change).

But last night - last night, at 5:45 pm, when I had FINALLY got home from a long day at work that included a tensemaking lab involving hazardous chemicals, when I had FINALLY sat down at the piano to practice, when I figured I could JUST squeeze in an hour of practice around the other things I had to do that evening, the phone rang.

I know, I know: I should just turn the ringer off, and I think I will be doing that in the future.

But I answered - not knowing who it might be (I don't have caller ID, and it wouldn't be that useful to me: I'd still have to get up and go to the phone to see who was calling).

It was some call claiming my credit-card interest rates are about to go up.

(Like the old joke about the hillbilly kid and the Thermos bottle: "How do it KNOW?" I have not received any notification from either credit union that I have a card through - and I know they would notify me, they are very good about that sort of thing. So, once again: SCAM)

At that point, I was fuming. My concentration was shattered. (I had been right at a tricky part that I had kept messing up). So when it said, "Press 1 to take advantage of this offer!" I pressed 1.

And waited through a minute or two of elevator music.

And then, when a woman came on and asked me if I wanted to take advantage of their EXCITING OFFER, I said:

"No. My number is (redacted). I want you to put me on your Do Not Call List. I have received three and four of these calls weekly, sometimes more than one a day. I often work at home* and I do not like having my privacy invaded and my concentration interrupted by a scam artist trying to sell me something. I regard this as harassment. Take my name off your list and never call me again."

She had no response, by which I assume she had either hung up, put the phone on speakerphone/mute and she and her cronies in the boiler room were making the universal Crazy Lady symbol next to their heads**, or she had muted the phone so if necessary it could later be claimed she never heard my request.

(*yes, grading is technically work.)
(**If not wanting these calls, and getting angry and fed up with them means I'm crazy, then I don't want to be sane)

Later, I looked on line and found that there's really nothing to be done.

Which is what makes this so infuriating, and makes me feel so helpless - apparently the scammers often spoof the numbers called-from, so if you have caller ID, you get a fake number showing up - when you report it, you're told it's not in service.

Asking for a company name and address either gets you hung up on, or if the company gets shut down, another one under a different name opens up soon.

It's like athlete's foot - you can't get rid of it. Infuriating.

And what's worse? Apparently some folks who use cell phones get these calls on their cell phones - coincidentally my soils lab folks and I had been talking about this while waiting for the sulfur test to develop and several of them said they'd gotten the scam calls on their cell phones. Which is even worse, because then YOU'RE paying for someone to try to scam you.

So, last night, at the end of my rope, sick and fed up with these calls, I considered the options.

Caller ID, while it might be useful otherwise, really won't solve the problem of "have to jump up and run to the phone" because I'd still have to go and see what number. And I think - though I could be wrong on this - someone calling from an unlisted number would show up in the same way as a scammer would - "Number blocked."

There's also something called Anonymous Call Block, but that's only useful (apparently, according to the AT &T website) if you happen to have a human stalker right in the same town where you are - it does not block "out of range" calls, and most infuriatingly, it does not block telemarketers.

I could also simply change my outbound voice mail message to something like, "You have reached (number redacted). Because of the high volume of telemarketing calls I am receiving - in direct contravention to the federal Do Not Call list - I am no longer answering my phone. Please leave your name, your number, a short message, and I will get back to you as soon as I check my messages." And then turn the ringer off on my phone.

While I don't LIKE that - because sometimes there are calls you really do need to take as soon as they come in - it would keep me more sane. And it has the added bonus of not announcing in any way, "I am not home right now." (because sometimes would be burglars call houses they are casing to see if someone might be home)

The other option - which only occurred to me this morning, and which I think I may use - is much simpler and less passive-aggressive. I will just do what I did in college - turn the ringer off on the phone during the times I don't want to take calls, and then turn it back on (I'd have to make myself some kind of a reminder note so I don't forget) when I'm done grading, or practicing piano, or reading. (One year when I was in college, my phone number was one digit off from a pizza place that was open late into the night. You can imagine the types of calls I got at 1 am until I realized I could turn off the ringer on my phone.)

But, the thing is - I should not HAVE to do that. But I guess I will.

Though I admit sometimes the activist part of my brain gets tripped a little - like last night when I took the woman to task for calling me - and I become tempted to NOT delete the messages left on my phone, to listen to them through and take down the number they suggest calling, and then call them. Multiple times. And do things like play a recording of the SpongeBob SquarePants "F.U.N. song" when someone picks up. Or read German poetry (my German pronunciation is atrocious, but whatever). Or tell them that God's gonna get them. Or something. Some kind of semi-surreal protest against being called at home.

Or call them back and ask the telemarketer for his/her home number, so *I* can call *them* at home when they're trying to, I don't know, read to their kids or cook dinner or some such. (And yeah, I know - the people who work in call centers, often that's the only job they can get, but still. And maybe I could ask for their manager's number.)

Or call the number, ask for the name and address of the business, and even though I know it will do no good, report them to the BBB and the FCC and anyone else I can think of who might crack down on them. Because this is so totally unnecessary. These businesses are doing something illegal - granted, they're not raping or robbing (well, except from the people who send them money) or anything like that - but still, it is frustrating to me that they stay in business.

I think I've remarked before that the part of not-being-married that I find most difficult is the "logistics" part. (As in: you need to be somewhere. Your car is not working. It is early in the morning so you do not wish to call a friend and bother them).

Yeah, logistics issues.

Sunday, my car started making an odd chattering noise. I thought, "Fan belt is going" and made a mental note to run it out to the shop (I had originally planned to do that after piano lesson today; this is the night the shop I use is open late).

Yesterday, driving home, I stopped at a red light. The car died.

First, the battery light came on.
Then, the oil light came on.
Finally, the engine light came on.

Now, a reasonable person - or perhaps someone with greater experience with unreliable cars - would immediately have tried restarting. But my experience with this car is: when something goes wrong, it's REALLY wrong. (See: transmission replacement of summer 2006).

So I mildly freaked out (the fact that I had spent the prior couple of hours wrestling one of the school's 15 passenger vans out on our pockmarked roads didn't help; I was already pretty stressed out). Jumped out of the car, started trying to figure out what towing company wouldn't rip me off too badly. And whether I could get it towed out to the shop and just LEAVE it there, even though they'd likely be closed for the day by the time it arrived.

Finally, some guy stopped and told me if I could get the car into neutral, he could push me into the nearest parking lot.(Actually, first, he told me, "If the transmission's shot, you may be able to still back up. Try that.")

I was able - after the car sat for several minutes - to restart it and get home. (And it only took 20 minutes for me to stop shaking).

So I took it out to the shop this morning (they open at 7:30) and described the symptoms (it stalled once on the way out there but I got it restarted). Then I had to get one of the mechanics to drive me to work. And they're very nice about it and all, but I can't help wishing a little I had someone willing to do that for me.

(As for getting back out to retrieve the car, I'm trying to repeat the mantra "we will cross that bridge when we come to it" over and over again. I'm already in gear to walk home and walk to my piano lesson if necessary; I wore slacks today so I could wear shoes that wouldn't kill my feet to walk in).

They're supposed to call me when they have the problem sussed out so I can decide whether to have it fixed or if it's (please God no) time to shop for a new car. (The car is nearly 10 years old but only has about 60K miles on it. Yes, I am a real homebody).

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's one, or some combination, of these:

battery (I'm only on the second battery for the car)
fan belt (that would explain the chattering)
alternator (that would explain the unexplained dying)

I'm hoping it's not something really horrible like the whole electrical system is going. I've decided anything over $1000 is probably not worth it at this point, especially if more stuff is likely to start going wrong. (But I really do not want to start looking for a new car. Ugh. And what does a person in a one-car household do in the interim? Rent? Walk? I hate this.)

Also, I had to spend most of the evening last night messing with firewalls and adware removers. Somehow my home computer got infected with one of those $)(%*&$$ pop-up ad generating things. The really annoying thing was that it would open them in Internet Explorer and I use Firefox for browsing. My first thought was to uninstall IE, but then I was (a) afraid the program would transfer to Firefox and (b) there are a few sites (some of the University sites even) that are not totally Firefox compliant and I have to use IE if I use them.

I THINK I got the problem fixed (and darn but there wasn't a lot of adware that got slipped onto my machine) but what a time-suck and an annoyance.

If it's not fixed, when and if I get my car back, I guess I'll take it out to the good computer guys who helped me when Communicomm was being unhelpful with the cable modem set up, and pay them $60 or whatever it is to do a scan and clean.

I will be very glad when Daylight Savings time ends this weekend.

I leave the house between 6:45 and 7 am most weekdays. This time of year - and again, in April, when DST starts - it feels like the stinking middle of the night out there. The sun doesn't come up until I am already in class. (And some nights, especially those I have evening meetings? I don't even get to see the sun on the back end).

I had been putting on my porch light, but as the city has been NOT AT ALL CLEAR when trick or treating is...apparently some are saying it's "not" Friday night because of football games, and some are saying it's Thursday, and a few people have even hinted it might be tonight, while others have said, "Nuh-uh, it's Friday," I just gave up.

I didn't buy any candy this year. (And Friday is OAS, so I'll be out of town).

The problem is, "porch light on" represents "welcome trick or treaters." And I don't want disappointed kids - and what's more, I don't want disappointed UNSUPERVISED kids who maybe aren't as well-brought-up as some, if you know what I mean.

So I decided that today, tomorrow, and Friday, I have to leave the porch light off, just in case I don't get home in time to shut it off before the kiddos would be out. (And no. I lack the electrical prowess to wire the thing to a timer - it's controlled by a switch so I'd have to actually break into the wiring of the thing and install the timer on that.)

Well, that was a FAIL. Walking down the porch steps, I only got the heel of my shoe on the bottom one and wound up slipping down the last step. I didn't actually fall, but I did get a bad shock to my one remaining good Achilles tendon.

Daylight Savings Time would be fine if we had a society where most people didn't have to toddle out of bed before 9 am, but I am quite sure that the majority of working Americans are either on their commute or at work before the sun comes up. And that just feels wrong. Going home in the dark does not feel nearly so wrong to me. (And yeah, I know, there are people who go to work in the dark year-round because their commute dictates they leave the house at 4:30 am or some insane hour - but even they'd benefit because it would be marginally less midnight-like when they set out on their commute, if we didn't have DST).

Frankly, I think what we need to do is have some kind of time-compression schedule, where everyone works between 9 am and 3 pm. And fix it so there is affordable and desirable housing in urban areas, so no one has those crazy 2 hour commutes. And where everyone gets one day off per week (outside of the weekend). The idea behind the day off would be that that's the time when you take your car in to the shop, go to the pharmacy, do your grocery shopping...leaving the weekend for more rewarding pursuits. (And the day-off would be staggered...that way, there'd be fewer people out, and there'd be a better chance of actually finding a pharmacy that was open on "your" day off.)

If that was the case, then Daylight Savings might be more appealing to more people. But for some of us, the way it stands now, it just feels like an insult...going out in the dead dark, off to work, with the knowledge that a certain percentage of the money I have gone off to earn is actually going to pay the generous salaries of the very people who voted, a couple of years ago, to extend the period of time during which I must drive to work in the cold dead dark with their "Let's extend DST!" Act.

Anyway. If I ruled the world, there would be no DST. Or if there were, it would be intelligently done, with some kind of averaging of average sun-up and sun-down times across all the time zones, to figure out a start date and an end date that would lead to the smallest number of people having to commute in what feels like the middle of the night.

*****

A couple of photos, one an ongoing project, one a finished project:

First, this:



It's the first (of four) panels of the knit TARDIS. I've started the second already. I want to have this done by Thanksgiving so I can take it with me - Christmas will be at my parents', but Thanksgiving I know will require less stuff hauled in the suitcase (shorter time period = fewer clothes required) so there's more likely to easily be room for it.

The colorwork is not as bad as I thought it would be. The purl side is Not Fun (which is why if I were doing another one of these, I'd cast on for all four sides at once, and do it in the round with a purl stitch between each panel to make the corners), but it's not that bad.

There's also a knit-plain top and bottom, and then a little dealie that you knit and fold up to make the light on the top.

And this is something I knit just for fun:



It's from the Bob pattern at Mochimochiland. (It looks like an animal, but the pattern author points out that it is inspired by the shape of a toilet-tank bobber. She also has a pattern for a roll of toilet paper - no, really* and also a couple of electronics parts (Resisty the Resistor and Captain Capacitor)


(*it would be too late for this year but you could make a bunch of these, make yourself a tree costume - like with a brown tracksuit or something - and attach them to yourself, and be a tp'd tree....)

For my "Bobbette" (Well, she's a girl, you know), I used one of those silly novelty yarns. It's Red Heart "Bijou" which is a fluffy yarn with sparkles. Except the fluffy isn't as soft as you'd think it was.

One thing about this pattern is that the shape is fundamentally pleasing. The curve of Bob's (or Bobbette's, in this case) back feels good in your hand - the toy is a nice size to hold. (I actually think it fits an adult's hand better than it would a child's).

You could also make little "costumes" for Bob to transform him into different animals - big floppy ears would make an elephant, a big bushy tail and tiny little ears would make him an anteater, small pointed ears and a curly tail for a pig...

Okay, this is a minor rant.

In one of my courses, students have to write a project proposal for a project they do. I make this assignment on the FIRST day of class (which was August 18th, this year). They have about a month to do them. I kept talking about the proposals, reminding them of them, reminding them of the "firm" due date of the start of class on the 19th.

I got 21 proposals. Out of a 24 student class.

So I graded what I had.

And I come in this morning - what do I find, but one of the missing proposals stuck in my mailbox. I last checked this mailbox at about 3:30 on Friday, so I know this is a way-late paper.

My main irritation with late papers is this (and maybe this is just me and I need to get over it) - but what I "hear" when I get a late paper is "Your time is unimportant enough that you can make the time to grade MY paper even though you did the rest of the class' several days ago." or "You have so much free time that grading this late paper should not be a burden."

It is, in my mind, not unlike the administrator who calls a meeting for 3:30, and then shows up at 4 pm, because they can make people wait - because they think their time is more important than others'.

We all are allotted 24 hours a day. Stealing someone's time is worse than stealing possessions, because time is truly the most limited and precious thing we have.

And yes, maybe it will only take me 15 minutes to grade this chap's paper. But that was 15 minutes I was not banking on spending today, or tomorrow, or the next day. And I made it abundantly clear that I didn't want late papers. (If I were a more assertive person, I'd probably copy the page of the syllabus that says "NO LATE PAPERS," staple it to his paper, and hand it back ungraded.)

Oh, and dude handed in a late lab assignment at the same time.

What I SHOULD do is refuse to grade them. What I probably WILL do, because I don't have the guts right now to deal with someone who's all upset because I adhered to a rule I made and he knew about, is wait until I have time to grade them, then knock some credit off for lateness.

(The fact that this guy and I have a "history" doesn't help - this is the fourth time he's signed up for this class. The first three he attended the first couple weeks then just disappeared, earning himself an F. [my campus has a policy of expunging failing grades if you retake the class]. He also signed up for a directed readings class I teach - in the summer, without asking my permission first, and it's a Permission of Instructor class. Then he never came to meet with me to choose his book, and when I tracked him down to ask him about it, he got rather huffy and said, "But I didn't KNOW who was teaching it!" Gah. That's the POINT of a Permission of Instructor - you find out who it is FIRST, then talk to them, THEN get permission.)

The kicker? This guy wants to go to seminary and be a minister. Not with this attitude, buddy.

Argh. People frustrate me sometimes.

On second thought - in one of my other classes I flat-out refused a late paper. Maybe I SHOULD refuse these.

Angry.

A T and T, you are ON NOTICE.

You have called me EVERY DAY THIS WEEK, at random times, trying to get me to buy your internet service.

I told you no the first and second times. The third, fourth, and fifth times I hit a little button on my phone that I have that plays a recording that says "This number does not accept this type of calls. Please put me on your no call list."

You called again just now. Yes, I was rude to the (probably making whatever minimum wage is in Bangalore) lady on the phone. I said, in a loud voice, "I DO NOT WANT TO BUY ANY MORE A T and T PRODUCTS. You have called me every day this week! Put me on your no call list!"

I HATE this company. Hate them. They did this to me when I dropped their long-distance service - called me up every night, at home, for two weeks. I finally had to almost cuss out the guy on the other end and write an e-mail to the highest placed person at A T and T I could find an address for.

This is STUPID. If someone says "No" once, calling them back the next day is not going to make them say "yes." Incidentally, in the corporate world, pestering someone to say "yes" when they have abundantly told you "NO" - if the situation involves dating - well, that is sexual harassment and is punishable under law.

A T and T, what part of NO do you not understand? It is TWO FREAKING LETTERS.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

If there were another option for having a landline phone in my town, I would totally take it. I used to have SBC until A T and T bought them out.

I should look into it. Maybe Verizon or someone has actually penetrated the market here for landlines. (I have to have a landline phone; cell service is too easily interrupted for me).

A T and T, if you continue to call me, I will continue to be rude. I am sorry but you are infuriating me and apparently you do not get the message. And obviously my hanging up on you does not work, so I will continue to say "I DO NOT LIKE BEING HARASSED AT HOME. PUT ME ON YOUR NO CALL LIST" until it actually sticks.

Too bad I can't count the cost of my time spent answering the phone off of your next bill to me.

If I were given the task of creating a world, one of the things I'd do? I'd limit how long seasons lasted to about a month and a half. So the most you'd get of hot weather at one go would be six weeks.

Because that's more than enough, in my book. (And there could only be six consecutive weeks of cold, for you winter-haters.)

I'm not sleeping well again and this time I'm sure it's the humidity. I wake up feeling like fists are squeezing my lungs, which is a decidedly unpleasant way to start the day. (I haven't even been TRYING to work out in the mornings because of that; the last thing I need at 5:25 am is a full-blown asthma attack. So of course the hour's workout in the afternoon eats into my relaxation time, and it's kind of a big ugly domino effect of things.)

I'm just really getting worn out of summer. I opened up my lunch kit today and almost started crying for no reason other than that I am sick unto death of the plain yogurt/fruit/nuts combination (with not even crackers to relieve it because I ran out of crackers and can't seem to remember to buy them when I'm at the store). I contemplated sticking the lunch back in my colleague's fridge and going out somewhere, but meh. The choices of lunch that can be done in a reasonable amount of time all involve either something fried in hydrogenated oils or something that uses mass quantities of cheese to cover up the fact that it doesn't really Has a Flavr. So I ate the d....d yogurt any way.

And I have no idea of what to fix for dinner; right now my tomato plants are between ripe tomatoes (and I lost a couple of ripe tomatoes over the weekend...it turns out one of the local stray cats either likes tomatoes, or was so hungry/thirsty that it was willing to pull them off the vine and eat them. I don't begrudge the cat the tomatoes, especially if it was starving, but that means no broiled tomatoes for a while.

And yes, I know it was a cat and not other local wildlife; I watched it eat the tomatoes through my bedroom window Sunday morning.)

I sort of lose my appetite/cooking mojo when it's hot like this. Everything either seems to take more effort than I want to put in, or it heats up the kitchen too much. So I wind up eating a lot of salad (and then getting really sick of salad).

At least I have the good kind of hummus in the fridge; at least I remembered to pick that up this weekend on my trip South. (The local stores only sell the "basic" variety and I prefer the Greek style.) So maybe I can make a hummus sandwich or scare up some pretzels to eat it with or something.

Aw, crud.

So my mom calls me up last night - "Is there anything you want from the little yarn shop here?"

Turns out she's asking, not because they're having a sale - because they're going out of business. Looks like their last few days will be the first few days I'm up there for a visit (but I suspect they'll be largely sold out of stuff).

The building they were in has been sold to a developer (boo, hiss) and like so many of the modestly-sized buildings in the downtown (sorry, I won't call it "Uptown" even though that's what the developers and stakeholders are insisting it be called), it's going to be torn down and (probably) replaced with some god-awful excrescence that some land-developer is using to immortalize himself.

The owner of the shop said in the letter she sent out that it was a hard decision to close - they had looked for other locations but they were either too expensive, too out-of-the-way (they got a lot of foot traffic from the University where they were), or they were next to fast-food places where the food fumes would embed themselves in the yarn.

So, dammit - no more yarn shop in my parents' town. They didn't even get to be open 2 years.

I know a lot of people are disappointed about what's happening in "don't call it Downtown any more." A lot of the older, familiar places are gone, replaced by pricey spots that are clones of ritzy places in Chicago. (Seriously - my brother, who knows whereof he speaks [He works at the University of Chicago] noted that "They're trying to turn it into another Hyde Park!")

While I suppose that's great for the rich kids from the Chicago 'burbs who might be homesick, it's kind of disgusting to a lot of the long-time residents. And I'm sure a lot of the college students (heck, probably some of the faculty and staff for that matter) are priced out of a lot of the downtown things now...the funky cheap pizza places are replaced by an Italian restaurant with cloth tablecloths, the used book store had to move, tenants are being imperiously told that their building is going to be torn down in x months...even when they just finished putting in considerable money to renovating/decorating their space.

(If I were a small businessperson, those stories would make me think twice - or more than twice - about locating there).

And I wonder...if the economic downturn continues, what will happen? What does a $30 a plate restaurant do if it doesn't get enough patrons who can easily afford that?

I really don't want to go visit my folks some day and find that the downtown has tumbleweeds rolling through it because everyone built too big and too expensive too fast.

But it makes me sad, especially looking at the town where I live now. When I first moved down here, the downtown was (I'll be honest) depressing. There were about 20 shuttered storefronts and maybe 6 or 7 places doing business. That balance is slowly reversing - we now have a really nice Italian restaurant (where you can get a decent dinner for $9, and $20 will get you the fanciest dish in the house). We have a quilt shop now. It looks like another antique shop (this one specializing in horse tack, but I hope that's not its exclusive line) sometime soon. And each one of these businesses represents a little victory - a little fight against a general mentality that says, "People only want what they can get cheap at Wal-Mart." Or a mentality that says "Downtowns are dead; everyone goes to the malls these days." Each of the little shops or restaurants I go in down here represents someone's dream, someone's hope. I do try to patronize them when I can - I especially like going in the quilt shop because it's so nice to be able to have a source of supplies SO CLOSE. (I will gladly pay a bit extra for my needles or skeins of floss if it means I don't have to drive to Sherman).

So it makes me sad to see what I perceive as an imperious attitude at the hands of the developers and movers-and-shakers in my parents' town - where there is (apparently) subtle pressure on building owners who haven't sold to sell, and where (as I said) modest one or two story buildings are being replaced by towers that blot out the sky. (I feel rather claustrophobic in the old downtown now; it's taken on a titanic scale that makes you feel small and a bit crushed).

And it's rumored that there's a particular "vision" these folks have, and if your business doesn't fit their "vision," they don't want you. (There was a lot of flap a couple years ago about a certain restaurant coming into town: the developers were at first aghast because it was a chain that was family-friendly - and it was DARING to go into an "upscale" area where they envisioned some kind of fancier place. Yes, they actually said "chain family-style restaurant" with disgust and horror and described the area it was moving into as "upscale." If I were the person in charge of bringing that chain to that town, I'd've said, "Thanks, but no thanks, if that's your attitude." But they came anyway - and they are always busy.

Sometimes, I think the developers in that town forget that the majority of people IN town are people with families. People who can't, or don't want to, go to an exclusive fancy place where children aren't really welcome, on a regular basis)

So anyway. This is another way that people annoy me sometimes.

I will admit - I did mention one yarn I had been contemplating to my mom. No idea if the particular color was there or if there were enough skeins. My mom said she was going down there (first day of the going out of business sale). She said she'd deliver my "condolences" to the owner, and also, if she could get a word with her, ask if there were any hopes of them relocating (It didn't sound like it in the letter, but you never know).

I wonder what's going to go in its place. Another damn bank, to go with the 15 others in the downtown? An Old Navy? (For years, that was the rumor - hoped-for by some college students, met with rolling eyes on the part of the townspeople who know there's already one in the mall). Some kind of place where there's a meter in the front to measure your coolness, and if you're below some pre-set level, you're not allowed in? (I know, that doesn't really exist. But I swan, there are some shops where I FEEL almost like there is that).

Egad I hate making results tables.

That is all.

An open letter to (some) people in my town:

This is (partly) why we can't have nice things.

I spent my Saturday morning - heck, probably 75 people spent their Saturday morning - out picking up trash. Now, how many of those people generated that trash? I'd be willing to bet a big fat 0.

Because the people who go out and pick up trash tend to care about what their town looks like. And that includes not throwing your $#)(# Sonic drink cup out the window when you're done with it. Or not leaving a pile of beer bottles by the side of the road. Oh, I know - open-container law. Underage drinking. Not wanting to get caught by cops, all of that.

But it's so damn SELFISH. Especially with the fast-food crap. How hard, really, is it to keep it in your car until you arrive at home, and then put it in the trash there. Okay, maybe you don't want your spouse/parents/kid to know you've been eating it, or you're not "supposed" to eat it re: doctor's orders...but why subject the rest of us to dealing with it, then, if you have what amount to either medical-order-compliance issues or family problems?

I drove in to work this morning and the stretch of road I had picked up? Even before the Solid Waste guys came and got the SEVEN giant leaf-and-lawn size bags I FILLED picked up? Beer cartons in the street. Crumpled hamburger wrappers on the side of the road. And NO, it is not something I "missed." It was not there Saturday.

I wonder - sometimes I really think - we should just stop doing the trash pick-up days. And stop getting the trusties from the prison to come and work. And discourage Scout troops from doing pickup. And just let it go for like a year, so people can see how horrible it looks, and can realize that most trash does not decompose in any reasonable time frame.

Because I don't know otherwise how to teach people that there isn't some Trash Fairy that comes and cleans it up while they sleep, or that somehow the trash magically goes away, or that the taxpayer's dollars pay for its removal (not in my town, they don't: it's almost 100% volunteer work).

It frustrates me because sometimes it seems metaphoric of my life. Work your tail off, work hard, give up free time, make yourself sore and wear yourself out...and a couple days later, it's as if you never were.

And yeah, yeah, the ideal thing would be for the litter bugs to be caught and forced to pick up their trash plus a bunch of other trash, but enforcement here is darn near impossible and I'm not sure I want some kind of creepy police-state where citizens rat on their neighbors (because then it becomes too easy for someone to falsely rat on someone they don't like, or someone who didn't do something they asked, or those kind of things).

But it makes me mad that twice a year we all go out and do this as an organized group, and many individuals go out on a regular basis on their own time to clean up, and practically the next day it's getting bad again. (It's just like the last time I picked up the block I "adopted" - the Monday after that some jerk came through and upended some of the trash cans that were out for pickup, and it was as if I never did it.)

And I have heard of businesses who chose not to come here after viewing the town and deciding it didn't fit with their "corporate image" - and word on the street is that all the litter was part of the reason they decided.

Isn't this how the modern world works, though? A small handful of selfish people screw it up for the rest of us? And trying to get those people to change their ways is darn near impossible - so the 98% of the non-jerk population winds up having to deal with the effects of the 2% that are jerks...

I have only one thing to say:

I really, really hate Daylight Saving Time. Especially now that it's starting earlier and going later. (And Congress: you don't think I'm on to what you're doing? You don't think that I KNOW you're going to, in the next year or two, make it a year-round thing, therefore making those of us who have to be at work before, say, 9 am, drive to work IN THE DARK for a goodly chunk of the year?)

I have gone from driving to work as the sun is coming up (last week) to driving to work in what feels like the middle of the night (this week). It's harder for me to back out of my drive without either (a) hitting my pecan tree or (b) messing up my neighbor's lawn by driving on it. Because I CAN'T SEE, because it is DARK.

My sleep schedule is all messed up. I don't want to eat when it's "time" to eat (and I don't have a choice - if I don't eat breakfast around 6:30 and lunch around noon, I don't have time to eat them at another time).

As for the "extra" hour of daylight that was stolen from my morning? I don't really get to enjoy it. You idle folks, who either work 9 to 5, or who are retired, or who are able to go and golf/garden/walk around outside in the afternoon - I hope you're enjoying my stolen hour of light. Because for much of that time, I'm spending it in windowless rooms in MEETINGS.

Good grief, if they have to take an hour away from us, why not take it during the middle of some meeting, instead of stealing it at night when we are all desperately trying to get enough sleep so we don't crash our cars and screw up at our jobs and get obese and die younger than we're supposed to?

(Why YES, I had a 14 hour work-day yesterday, why do you ask?)

First, a disclaimer: I have not seen the book in question, as it has not been published this side of the Atlantic yet. But I find it hard to believe that it is everything people are whipping it up to be: 'pinny-p0rn'

Good grief, people. Get a grip. Lady writes a book about how it's nice to take time to make cupcakes sometime, about being a stay-at-home mom with a bit of a creative sense, and everyone's leaping on her like she's threatened to drag women back into the home, kicking and screaming, by their hair. There's a thread about it in the book section of Knitter's Review. Some people defend the book, others accuse it of "setting up unrealistic expectations for women."

Um. Read a fashion mag lately? Listened to any of the "success" oriented radio programs that clog the airwaves every weekend? Paid attention to the celebrity-addled television news?

EVERYTHING in this world is unrealistic expectations.

What you have to learn to do is find what makes you happy, and say "devil take the rest." (I still haven't learned that; I look at colleagues c.v.'s as part of the "sharing information" process and go "But he has published five more papers than I have! I suck!")

When I read Jane's blog, I get a feeling of happiness and peace. I don't feel like she's setting up unrealistic expectations for me, that she's raising the bar to some impossible level (I'm perfectly good at setting my own "bars" at unreasonable levels without anyone's input, thanks). I love her photographs. I love all the baking she does. Oh, I do envy her a little bit...envy that she has the time to contemplate things like rock buns and aprons when my life seems to be hurtling along at an insane pace, where the closest I get to a rock bun is if I happen to get down to the natural foods store and they have Newman's "Hermit" cookies in stock, and an apron is something I forget to put on when I'm trying to cook dinner before my evening meeting. A lot of times I have a little pity-party for myself, as I get home at 8:45 pm and realize that to follow my schedule, I will need to be up and out of bed in just over eight hours.

But you know? On my non-pity-party days, I look at Jane's blog and go, "Thank God there's someone who has time to enjoy these things and write about them." And I think, "Maybe during one of my breaks from school I can bake a cake like that."

I don't know. It seems kind of silly...no, worse than silly...to refer to that kind of thing as pr0n. From what I can tell (again: disclosure, haven't seen the book), she is NOT saying, "This is the only way to live," and not even "this is a better way to live than many others."

(And speaking of unrealistic expectations...I am not exactly experienced in that form of, uh, entertainment that her book's being compared to, but isn't THAT kind of known as being the pinnacle of unrealistic expectations? Is not the fact that "recontouring" surgery (for the parts from which a baby can emerge on a woman) has become a thinkable thing the result of that very industry to which her book is being compared? Is not the current trend for women to have to get every square inch of hair that is not on top of their heads or on their eyebrows painfully pulled out every month using hot wax a result of this industry?)

At any rate. On KR, she's being compared to (the Devil to some) Martha Stewart.

Yes, Martha Stewart presents a somewhat unrealistic world. And you might not like that world. But does that make it less valid than what you like? Does it make it somehow evil to dream of having the time to have a perfectly pressed tablecloth, and cunning turkey cut-out cookies frosted with everyone's name as place markers?

There are all different kinds of fantasy. Please do not begrudge those of us who have craft-fantasies or house-fantasies our small joys, just because they are not your fantasies. (And honestly? It's more fun for me to daydream about getting my house JUST PERFECT than it is to daydream about, say, giving a paper at a presentation and overturning some long-held paradigm of ecology. And I think my house-dreams are a good bit more realistic).

As for people who don't like her blog, my standard comment: no one is forcing you to read it.

I don't know. It's CHOICES, people, dammit. We all make choices in life. Yes, sometimes I'm a little sad that my choice of career means I don't have time to make cupcakes or spend hours quilting every day. But then again, there are other good things about my career. And I'm not going to slam someone because she made choices different than I did. She's not breaking any laws. She's not forcing anyone to do as she does...and as far as I can tell from her blog, she's not even really smug about her choice, there's not really a sense of sing-songy "I'm better than you are."

I just have two other things to say:

1. If this is how "lifestyle essay" books are going to be met in the future, then I release my dream of ever writing a book based on my inmost thoughts. It would be far too painful to have a reviewer slam it as smug or unrealistic or antifeminist.

Look. Those of us who enjoy cooking, knitting, sewing, even keeping house and raising children: we are not saying that we want all women to leave the workplace. We are not advocating some damn Handmaid's Tale world. That's one of the things that bugs me - so many of the people who go a little eyerolly over Nigella or the craft blogs or Martha Stewart seem to be worrying about, that this is the first vanguard of women being stripped of their status as "functional adults"...that the next thing is that we'll be disenfranchised, and then kept home, barefoot and pregnant (or made into servants, if we can't get pregnant). And it's not that at all. It's just someone saying, "This is a nice way to live; I enjoy it. Maybe you'd like to try it a little bit."

2. I really hope Jane doesn't quit blogging - or quit planning a second book, if that was in the works - over this. Because then the nasty attitude people would have won. And I don't like to think of the mean, bad-attitude people winning. (And yes, that's my opinion. But I think calling a stay-at-home mom's book about baking and embroidery "pr0n" and suggesting she's smug or anti-feminist is kind of mean-spirited. If you didn't like the book because of how it was produced, if you found it poorly written or shallow, say so. But don't take your own personal paranoias...which is what I think the review writer DID...on the book). I also get a distinct scent of "sour grapes" from some of the commenters.

(Note to self: when jealous of what someone else is able to do, don't go the sour grapes route. It's really unbecoming.)

Do men do this to each other? When some guy writes a book on chucking it all and building a boat, do other men attack him?

Oh, crikey, what a day. (more whinging ahead).

It was hot. And the heat was on in my one classroom.

And my three most troublesome and disruptive students in one class were true to form, and turned in unfinished homework that earned them exactly 0 points each - what they had done, they had done wrong. And probably because they spent the time when I was showing how to do the homework talking to each other, or were absent.

And then I had a faculty meeting - a long, and for us, rather acrimonious meeting where basically nothing got solved and everyone walked out feeling unhappy about how our program works, or how people perceive it as working. I got home less than 1/2 hour ago. There oughta be a law against meetings going past 4 pm on a Friday.

And I have a commitment on campus tomorrow morning because apparently everyone else who could have done it had something else they were doing.

And I'm having to do my Sunday school lesson, so I get no free time tonight.

And I'm just sad and tired and things aren't going well and I feel like I need a "fluster" and I don't know what to eat for dinner because I'm too tired and too busy to cook, but nothing from "out" appeals to me (and it's all bad-for-me food anyway).


And why is it that the people who work the hardest (I am not necessarily including myself in this group, but making an observation) seem to be the ones who keep getting more work piled onto them until they are nearly Dead From The Work, and the people who weasel their way out of everything still manage to keep weaseling? (I'm thinking students here).

It just isn't fair. Yeah, yeah, life isn't fair, but it's still not right.

A little whinge, if I may:

it is stinking hot here. And humid. And miserable. It is supposed to be fall- you know, cooler weather, nice breezes, low humidity, RAIN?

The heat index right now is very nearly 90 and it is not as hot as it will get today.

The thing that really gets me is how the weathermen keep getting our hopes up with promises of a "cool front" - but then those fronts keep 'washing out' and turning into stationary fronts. Which just bring more HOT.

This is the time of year when I despair of ever being able to wear any of the sweaters I've knit. Or any of the socks, for that matter.

Oh....And....they've turned the HEAT on in a couple of the classrooms! (we have no control over the heating/a/c - it's done either centrally or through a pre-programmed system). I told my students that if the heat kept up I would be finding a different room for us to meet in. I cannot teach in a room where it's 85* or hotter.

I got up to where you start doing the decreases for the armhole on Kenobi, and decided I was just too tired to concentrate on it at that moment.

Because, I had spent over an hour previously that afternoon/evening replacing my mailbox. My mailbox got vandalized over the summer (someone went down the street pulling flags off of boxes and bending the doors open). I had managed to put it back into a sort-of working order, but the past few days, the door wouldn't stay closed, and I didn't like the thought of a bill (or worse, a letter from someone) merrily blowing out of the box and down the street, never to be seen again.

So I made a trip out to Lowe's and bought a new, "Triple Strength" (we shall see) mailbox. And got the old mailbox off the post only by applying cooking oil (I didn't have any penetrating oil on hand) to the nuts and bolts. And two of the bolts were too scarred up to reuse.

And, as it turns out, even though mailboxes come with pre-drilled holes to accommodate nuts and bolts, they do not actually come with any hardware. So I had to make another trip to Lowe's (the local hardware store, which is closer to me, closes at 3 pm, which is most inconvenient) and spend a while searching for the appropriate size. Then return home and replace the mailbox.

If this one gets vandalized I am going to do one of three things:

1. Even though it's a pain to have to go over there every day, rent a box in the local post office

2. Hire someone to build me a sturdier mailbox, like one of those with a brick post (though those aren't perfect; one of my friends who lives out in the rural area says she thinks the vandals see those as a "challenge." Well, if someone wants to bust up his pickup damaging my mailbox, then he's even stupider than I thought)

3. Hire someone to help me do Lynn's trick of buying two different sized mailboxes, and then setting the smaller one in concrete inside the larger one.

Because I am SICK of this, ya'll. I've replaced a mailbox on average once every two years that I've lived here. That's stupid - it's a waste of my time (And when you get maybe 2 hours "to yourself" in a given day, it leads to a lot of resentment, having to spend one of those hours replacing a dang mailbox), my money, it's a waste of resources (Can they even recycle old dinged up steel mailboxes? It's hardly worth my time to drive it down to the recycler). And, perhaps most importantly, it's a waste of my goodwill. I'm going to be less willing to give a few bucks for programs "to help at-risk youth" if I feel like some of those youth might be spending their weekends playing mailbox baseball.

I realize that people who vandalize aren't thinking - they don't care about the feelings or the effort of the people whose stuff they're vandalizing - but it still strikes me as one of the stupidest crimes out there. I'd like to see large mandatory amounts of hours of community service for anyone caught vandalizing. (And that includes graffiti. I know some people think of graffiti as a form of art - and, murals painted graffiti style on buildings WHEN THE BUILDING OWNERS AGREE is a form of art, but just going and "tagging" something to show you were there is in my mind no different from a dog urinating on a tree. And you know? There should be some things that separate us from the animals. And yeah, we've started having a graffiti problem in my town - apparently some gang that uses "127" as their code is marking their territory - and it's really crapped up a couple of the local parks to the point where people don't want to let their children play there any more, because they think it's not safe. So the stupid gang wins. And several local businesses have had to be re-sided or powerwashed. It's just such a WASTE.)

****

On happier news. I'm trying to decide whether to do a "theme" for October. I don't think I'm going to do "Socktober!" again, I'm not disciplined enough to stick to one project type (and I can't even be sure of finishing a single thing in a month).

I might do "Finished Object October!" where I try to finish up some of the things that are currently on the needles, including several projects (Bloom, the Miranda Socks, the Morehouse Farms "Monet" scarf) that I've been working on for a long time but that have kind of been in perma-stall.

Or, maybe I should designate it as "Start-ober!" as in starting new things I want to do. (Or maybe "Start-ober" works better as a pun on "start over" - which means I could work on projects I had begun and had stalled on).

I don't know. I do know I have an awful lot of stuff in progress that I'd like to get finished up so I can start new stuff.

If I did "Start-ober!" with the idea of it being to re-start stalled projects, I have:

Samus (yes, it's still on the needles; I need to finish the bottom band and then pick up allllllll those stitches)

Bloom (which probably would finish up pretty fast, it would just mean taking it out and working on it)

the Miranda socks (almost up to the heel turn on the second sock, I think

the Morehouse Farms scarf

the crochet blanket (Yes, still have that going, too, haven't touched it in months)

the crochet Totoro (I can see why the one blogger said it "died" because she couldn't take all that single crochet. But I don't want my Totoro to die)

the quilt in the frame (Yup, haven't touched that in over a month).

A quilt top ("Straits of Georgia") that I haven't worked on in a while, mainly because I've had no big blocks of free time when I wasn't too exhausted to face the sewing machine

So maybe that's what I should do - have a clear-the-decks month where I bang through all the unfinished projects, and then allow myself the fun and luxury of starting new things when I've finished a few things on the needles. Maybe I should challenge myself to see how many things I can finish - both of the "active" projects and the "stalled" projects - this month.

TChem was talking about last names and their commonness (or lack thereof) the other day.

My last name (which is supposedly Irish but was perhaps originally - I mean, like, pre-1066 originally - French) is fairly common, but not that common where I live now.

Also, I have my name in the phone book as Lastname, First-initial - because of years of being counseled as a Single Woman, that I Needed To Do That so I could avoid creepy bad phone calls from people who guessed I was a woman living alone from the lack of a male name.*

But you know? The creepy calls I've received in the past couple years have been:

about 8 calls from collection agencies all looking for women with the same last name as I have, but a different first name (but with the same initial)

a sheriff's call looking for someone with the same initials but a different name from me (And that was a creepy one - it was on Thanksgiving so I figured they were really looking for this woman, and not for a good reason.)

someone who apparently drunk-dialed late at night and left an incoherent message that I don't think was meant for me (I'm guessing that when drunk, it's kind of easy to, say, hit the "9" when you meant to hit the "8"). (And I was really, really glad I didn't get up out of bed to answer that phone call when I heard the phone ring at 2:30 that morning)

(*And yeah, I know, I could get all feminist on that concept, that women are expected to append themselves, nominally-speaking, to their male Significant Other, but I don't have the energy for that right now)

I got yet another collection-agency call today, looking for Ellen [MyLastName]. (Except I thought on the message they said, "L and L," like it was a business with two people). Now, because I am (a) an overly nice person and (b) always paranoid about identity theft (and, after all, a collection call when you know all your bills are paid up makes you wonder if there are bills you don't know about), I called them back.

Always a hassle. I had to finally hit the pound key - after being asked twice to "verify" by typing in the last four digits of my SSN (which I knew would do no good, as I was not Ellen [MyLastName].) I got someone and explained and they promised to take my name off of the database.

But - I'm beginning to wonder about the wisdom of having Lastname, FirstInitial listing in the phone book - I almost feel like not getting calls seeking someone who's either down on her luck or a deadbeat would be an acceptable tradeoff for the heavy-breather calls I MIGHT get.

I don't know. I hate phones anyway.