Thursday morning things

* I have to work up some motivation to revise a couple more PI chapters today. I really want to have this mostly or completely done before school starts, because you KNOW there is always something that comes up and I do NOT want to be staying late some Mondays just to get the chapter for the week ready.

* One thing I did do, though: finally break down all the cardboard boxes I had and took them to recycling. I took them to the central location on campus even though I am told we can bring things to the building and then call the print shop to pick them up. Because for one thing, it's easy enough for me to do it on my way in, and for another it means the boxes don't sit FOREVER until print shop has a worker free*

(*I still have a giant pile of brush that has been sitting at the curb for a month, festering, and the city hasn't come to get it. They are supposed to do at least one pick up a month but of late they've not been so great about it)

But also, I don't want Certain Colleagues seeing the pile of boxes and judging me for how much I mail order.

I do it (all the mail ordering) partly because it's just easier, in the heat, than trying to find a time to drive to Sherman that's not deadly hot, roads-full-of-traffic, or stores-full-of-difficult-people.

But also. It's kind of disheartening, especially on a long day at work where you feel like you're the only one on Earth (the building has been too quiet this summer) to come home to a mailbox of just ads and charity solicitations. So I order stuff. Sometimes stuff I don't strictly need. I dunno. I suppose some people would suggest that means I live an awfully empty life and I suppose in some ways I do, but there have been a lot of days this summer where coming home to my quiet empty house has not been nearly as nice as it is on days during the school year.

Also, when I stopped by the recycling area? Looks like some folks have just left their trash there, too, for Recycling to deal with.

That's why we can't have nice things. And it's an ongoing problem. At church and also at my building on campus, we have Dumpsters for the trash (well, at church, it's so the residents of the couple of apartments we have have a place to throw their trash). More than once, someone has decided "hey I have this couch I don't want any more, and here's a Dumpster - I can just leave it here, and now it's someone else's problem" and we've had cases where we couldn't throw our own trash away because the Dumpster was full.

And back when I had the horrible neighbors (fifteen years now!) I had to keep my rollcart hidden away and only put it out first thing Monday morning (rather than the more-convenient Sunday night) because if I had it out in the open they'd use it. I'd go out with my last Monday morning bag of trash and it'd be overflowing with beer cans and beer cases.

And, okay. If I had a good neighbor and they said either "We're going on vacation and don't want to leave our cart out all that time, and we will only have one bag of trash, would you have room for it?" or "My cart is full and I have a bag left over, might you have any space?" (We pay per weekly pickup, not per bag), I'd say yes, of course.

But this is where I really dislike the attitude of "It's better to ask forgiveness than ask permission" which several people have quoted at me, either when I wanted to do something but was unsure of the right person to ask permission of, or when they just DID something without asking someone - it abuses the good will of the other person.

If you ask permission first, you are giving them the option to say "No." They may have a good reason. Or they should just have the right to say "no," no further explanation needed. Sometimes with some people letting them do something ONCE means you wind up letting them do it many times, even when it's not convenient. (The "If you give a mouse a cookie" phenomenon).

But if you just DO it, you are counting on them to forgive you. You have already committed an offense, you are now putting the onus of forgiveness on them - they may be put out, or annoyed, or made uncomfortable (I was SUPER creeped out the day I found my neighbors' trash in my bin, and I worried - given their partying habits - if there was anything in there that, if the cops searched our trash, I'd find myself in trouble over? And how would I convince them that those WEREN'T my drugs?)

I dunno. I just grow weary of how much some of us are asked to put up with things that "do us a discomfort" in the name of letting other people live their lives more easily.

A smaller but similar imposition: the person in line at the store (or anywhere) who says, "I'm in a hurry, can I go ahead of you?" or "I have just this one thing, can I go ahead of you?"

And yes, once or twice, when the person immediately behind me had just one thing and I had a full cart, or they had a very few items and a fussy small child, I've quietly said, "Would you like to go ahead of me so you get out of here faster?" but it seems that the people who ask to impose are never the person with the fussy small child or with vastly fewer items....

I dunno. I was raised not to impose on other people and I admit I get annoyed when someone tries to do that on me.

* Planning my weekend trip to see Laura. She PMed me about some of the things there to do, so I was able to graciously ask one thing I was wondering about: should I bring my own towels and stuff? It's been ages since I stayed at the house of someone other than my parents, and I don't remember etiquette and also she has a well and septic system so maybe bringing my own towels and taking them home with me to wash would make sense? (I know my uncle's cabin, where they have septic, they ask people to be really careful about how many loads of laundry they do in a day...)

But yeah. It sounds exciting, and like maybe a lot of the fun I missed out earlier in the summer will get packed into Friday and Saturday.

And anyway, I need to get out of town. My town is VERY small and that smallness becomes very obvious when it's too hot to go and do anything.

(ETA and now I know more details without having to ask too awkwardly and that is good. I am one of those people who needs things planned down to the minutest detail in order to be comfortable but I also know some people get super annoyed by that, and again - I tend to be more inclined to let myself be uncomfortable than to risk making someone else so. Which is an unfortunate thing and something I probably need to grow out of. But at least now I know:
 - yes, there is a bed for me to sleep in, so I don't need to arrange for a camp mattress
 - no, I don't need to bring towels

I will probably bring my own pillow though, just because I'm used to it. And I might bring my little stuffed Muffin Pony (aka Derpy) both as a "friend" and also if there are any good photo-ops to do the "Derp in the Heart of Texas" thing I once joked about - we are going to Carthage, which is as far into Texas as I've ever been. (Maybe I should even charge up and take my camera, instead of counting on her taking and e-mailing me photos....)

* And unbelievably (to me) it might be down into the upper 80s next week. So even though I may well be spending some money on this trip (she has noted there is a used book store and a quilt shop and a yarn store the various places we will be), I MIGHT take a day next week and go to Whitesboro. Or maybe just back to Downtown Sherman, and go antiquing and to the yarn store there.

I don't need more yarn, I have plenty. But part of it is...oh, part of the whole craft-shopping thing (and also bookstore, especially used-bookstore where there's unusual stuff) shopping is that you kind of promise yourself that "if I buy this, I will have time to enjoy it" - to sew the fabric up into quilts or whatever, to knit the yarn into a garment, to read the books. (And I do need to get more disciplined: most of my summer really has been me hanging out on twitter and not-knitting, and I need to finish a few more things)

Someone made a comment on Twitter to the effect of "Now that women no longer read Barbara Cartland or watch soap operas, what do the lovelorn do?" and I retweeted it with the comment of "I mostly tweet a lot and hope someone will respond" (Assuming by "lovelorn" they mean 'someone without any love in their life" rather than "someone in the throes of unrequited love or a bad affair").

But yeah. I realized that my version of being the little old lady who buttonholes people at the bank and tells them about her ailments is me tweeting random stuff out and hoping someone responds, or at least "likes" it. 

* I did pull out the Augusta cardigan to try to restart it last night....and spent about ten minutes looking for the index card where I wrote down the plan for the sleeve increases. I finally did find it, though surely I could have reconstructed them from the pattern and the row counter I had, but I'm glad I didn't have to. I think this will be my next push-to-finish (well, with a break to work on the Paddington neckwarmer and the new little mitts as "travel projects" in case there is any downtime this weekend....)