Saturday, April 14, 2007

Liberations, Deletions, Ruminations

It's hard to believe I haven't actually said so here but cBFF Dave has resigned what appears to be his last position in the United States as a public health official. His last day was Friday; Thursday evening he was a bit nervous about the big changes heading his way but also looking forward to getting through and settling happily, and hopefully permanently, with T. in a place where they can both rely upon continuous employment and residence and recognition of their marriage to boot. Its a good thing for them. It leaves a whole pile of us here very sad.

So it was that I deleted two entries of his from my phone's directory. I noted at the same time I hadn't removed the multiple entries for my own offices, voice mails, key personnel.

Back to Dave: he has two interviews lined up for later this month in the health authorities in the immediate vicinity of Vancouver. You know, some would say that he's actually losing very little in this deal. Just everyone he loves except for T. I mean, I've thought about that alot---if the situation were reversed---I mean I would just HATE to leave my parents, Tracy, Dave and A.; baby Milo and his family, on and on. But as much as I'd hate it, there's no doubt that if circumstances required Rob to be somewhere else, I'd go. I wonder how easy it would be for me to get over the hating it part---whether that would manifest itself in some malignant, subconscious actions... Our move from Florida to Baltimore was a similar thing but not the same scale: I left a job and friends I loved, a wonderful community. But it wasn't like moving out of the country, across the continent to boot. Occassionally Rob daydreams about moving our young family to a slower paced place---it unnerves me. Even now with Dave leaving, we have so much invested here and a tremendous sense of community...

So Dave has some free time now to get their house ready to sell (hey, Jason: how about the Mid-Atlantic??) and to prepare for a move that he anticipates will happen just before my birthday in June.

Validations, too
You know, the Universe really does have this way of putting you exactly where you need to be. In the last three or four weeks, there have been at least six occassions when I would have had to modify my work schedule, with all the attendant strain and guilt, to care for sick children, mother-in-law, all kinds of snafu-s. I do miss my colleagues. But not the work or anything else. The money a little bit, I guess. But that really hasn't been so bad.

My cable provider...
Some time ago, our household switched from DirecTV/TiVo to Comcast Digital/High Def/DVR. It was the right move financially and also in the interest of advancing technology and a couple of really bad business moves on DirecTV's part. Comcast f*cking sucks and I hate them. I've had no fewer than seven service calls to remedy this problem or that...the technicians so amazingly myopic as to completely ignore the issues they create in solving the problem they came to fix. In particular, in the last five days, we've had three technicians come out. Yesterday a lovely, lovely technician came out and did a really fine job fixing my downstairs box. But somehow in the process, our service on the upstairs box was blown out...at some point last evening we all also lost all audio on the downstairs unit...let's just say it was no fun at all.

And you know, of course, that there's this inverse relationship between the need to watch TV and the skills to manage the equipment in this household among certain persons in the family. I will say that Mr. TV-watcher was sufficiently grateful as to vaccuum the house while I was troubleshooting and made my lunch. As of now, still no cable on the glorious new plasma upstairs. Guess what? I have to arrange for another service visit.

Except can I tell you this?? I went out late morning to collect Haley from her slumber party, dash to Target to buy a gift for her party beginning at 12:30 and over to Best Buy to grab some cables, etc to support my TV tinkering. When I came home, I found the love of my life fussing with the vaccuum---the new one we bought when I became Suzy Homemaker last month. Its all techno-cool 'cuz that's the kind of girl I am. Any who---Haley greeted him and he said he couldn't "figure out" the vaccuum...Haley quickly diagnosed the problem: it was not plugged in. Well kids, once we straightened that little procedure out, he did a great job of cleaning the carpets for us. He thought it was "cordless".

I love my pumpkin of a husband.

Knitting

I'm in love with my super secret knitting. Its producing a great something to look at but I'm afraid that the knitting is a bit dull so I have to trade off to other projects. Here's a look at the back of Krista, only about two inches to go before shaping the arm holes and finishing the back.

I hate to say it, but the four errors I've made on the lacy part s are starting to drive me bananas. I usually let stuff like that go but I'm afraid I might have crossed the line from a few barely noticeable shifts to WTF was she doing???

Macy Gray -- Why Didn't You Call Me? On How Life Is

So here's an artist who seems to fallen off the face of the earth. She's a crazy person, for sure but she seriously knows how to rock and has her own thing. I love this track. It came up today randomly in a playlist on my iPod---perhaps one of my favorite things: to be reminded of songs I hadn't thought about in a long time.

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