Waiting on dishwasher

Installer guy is supposed to be here at 8.

We will see. I have very rarely had any kind of "worker" in who came when they said they would. I have a promise from the secretary that if they're not done by 11, she will start my exam for me but I don't want that to happen.

The student did e-mail me back. Pleaded extended illness, but you know? I'm not a mind-reader. I can't tell "silence because sick" from "silence because not trying anything" from "silence because problem got fixed." I don't know what to do and I'm out of ideas and out of energy. They are begging me to make it work for them again 'for partial credit' though really? Given what they've revealed to me they probably should have taken a medical leave of absence.

And yeah yeah, I get that some of our students don't know how to negotiate the university system yet, and their families don't know, and some of the campus offices are....not always as up-front about the services they provide as they could be....but I get tired, as a faculty member, so tired, of being expected to MANAGE so many things.

As I've said before: some weeks I can barely manage my own life.

So I don't know. Maybe I just let them contest their grade, whatever, and I just let Future Me deal with that fight.

I'm TIRED.

I keep thinking about how nice it would be to be tooling down the highway, headed towards....oh, whatever. Antiquing, maybe. I wish there were some nice small *country town* near me that had a lot of antique shops - sometimes going into Sherman or even Denison is not so fun because parking can be a mess and there are bad drivers and sometimes you have to deal with Too Many People. (I am also not a huge fan of the "antiques fair" model, where things are set up for a weekend and you have a crush of people, and also you often have elevated prices - I heard some tv ad for an antiques weekend thing somewhere in the general vicinity and the comment was made that it was "one of Country Living's antique-shows-not-to-miss" and I thought "Yeah, and it'd have prices I'd not want to pay."

Little country sleepy town antique shops, though, often have treasures you can find for a reasonable price.

Or, I'd like to go somewhere where there were several craft-related shops (Whitesboro, if I get there Friday, will be close to this) where I can just sort of float through the shops and look at stuff and talk to people with the same interests as I have and buy myself stuff and go "oh, pretty!" about some fabric line or a hand-dyed skein of yarn or a shawl the yarn-shop proprietor knit and has on display....

Or I was thinking again about "The Land of Make Believe" - a shop that existed when I was a kid (they were the place that sold Smurfs, as well as some other little toys) and how shops like that seem not to exist any more, or at least maybe don't exist outside of big cities. Everything is "mainstream name brand" at places like Target, and you tend not to find the little bitty things like Smurfs (too easily shoplifted, I presume). Small toys are all blister-packed instead of sold loose. There was also "The Attic," which sold small toys (when I was very young, when they were in their first location, they sold little animal magnets - made by a company called Peaceable Kingdom, I remember that - they were made of pompoms that were kind of like ball-fringe in texture. Or like they were made out of embroidery floss. I had a couple dozen of those. It was little things like that; stuff a kid could spend their allowance on. (I've searched for images of these things online but either they weren't widely known, or have gone down the Gen X memory hole). At least the internet remembers Diener rubber eraser animals, which were another favorite (and cheap! and available at the office-supply store, where my parents went regularly anyway!).

Part of it with these was not the having, but the getting - hunting through the bin of Itty Bitties to find one you didn't have, or to find the particular color you wanted. But also, yes, I did play with them when I was a kid. And I played with my little Peaceable Kingdom magnet animals.

I collected a lot of things as a kid. I liked having my magnet animals on the metal shade of the old pink floor lamp that was in my bedroom; I liked having my rubber eraser animals lined up on a shelf. I still collect things as an adult - Ponies, and blindbag toys and Re-Ment and stuffed animals and I really do think that collecting urge in me is a desire to recapture some of the good parts of my childhood and hang on to those happy childhood feelings, when I was building Lego brick houses for the little eraser animals, or when I climbed trees carrying Ziggy the hedgehog (one of my Peaceable Kingdom magnet animals and my favorite one) in my pocket.

Eventually, I got older. Shops changed, and moved around. Smurfs became popular and for a while when I was in junior high they were the big hot thing....then I suppose something else took over, but I still liked the little animal toys, and yes, the Smurfs. I hung on to that stuff long after it ceased to be "cool." And I kept liking little things and collecting them as I got older...

And there was another shop, I don't even remember its name now, that was in downtown Ann Arbor when I lived there, and the center of the shop was a giant table with glass dividers to make it a bunch of small bins - maybe 15 or 18 different bins? - and they sold tiny toys and import things (like those Chinese silk pincushions with the little dolls on them) and it was just fun to go and browse and see what they had. I miss that kind of shopping,

Too much here, it's all very "functional" shopping. I don't know if that's a result of history/economics of this part of the world, or if people don't generally do that kind of "go out and browse" shopping any more, or what. But I do miss it - where you *might* spend $15 in a day, on some little thing, something you don't really need, but something that is nice to have.

I also need some new places to go. I get tired of the antique shops in Sherman and Denison; I keep seeing the same stuff at them all the time. But I don't know of very many places; it seems I kind of live in an empty area. Maybe that was so in Illinois when I lived there, but then again - it seemed a lot of the little towns had an old downtown with shops, and places to go. I think this area is more "Western US" in the sense that people seem not to mind driving an hour for stuff (based on people I've talked to who talk about going to Dallas for groceries or clothes-shopping or something) and that's just not my thing.

But yeah. I suppose everyone is looking for a rock to tie a piece of string around, and for me, that is the little toys - yes, even still. I just wish I had better ways of finding them and more fun places to go and shop for them