In which I’m blogging, goddamn it, I don’t even care if I don’t even care!

Recently my brother gave me a speaker he found in the road because I’d complained all my speakers were crap. I guess he actually saw a vehicle drive over it before he stopped and picked it up. Well, it’s fine, it kicks ass, and it’s tiny.

a li’l speaker guy

It’s a Clip 5. You can clip it to shit! It’s waterproof. IT WAS TOTALLY FREE. It sounds astonishingly good for its size. Right now I have it playing bhajans.

Friday night I went to the Milton-Freewater Downtown Alliance Chamber awards dinner. My boss gives me a free ticket, and this is my third year attending.

The food was great, the wine was great, and the awards themselves are really nice because they remind you that a lot of people are actually quite humble and wonderful, and operate under the assumption that their duty is to care and help and give back, so they just go around fixing shit and funding things and quietly making life better. Which is something we need to see from time to time, lest we get all jaded and bitchy reading about politics and living and working with men, as we do.

One of the fun parts of the dinner is that there’s a table decorating contest, so not only does the place look nice for the event but no matter where you’re seated you get local business-provided swag because you get to keep whatever’s on your table. (The people who sat at the cheese factory-sponsored table this year got cheese, cream, butter, and tiny Jersey cows!)

awards dinner

My table this year had a giant tagine for a centerpiece and abundant chocolates; I didn’t want the tagine but I did get the little rug it was sitting on, which turned out to be probably a bath rug:

new li’l rug guy, on the living room floor next to a cushion and another li’l rug; this is where i sit to meditate

I wanted it as a meditation asana, and it’s perfect for that! It’s extremely soft, even if I’m not a fan of the fake-distressed rug designs, and fine to sit on.

I also got a half dozen rocks glasses, and nearly all the candy on the table, because nobody else wanted it. Whoo!

Work’s the same, I mostly enjoy it because it’s not fucking Comcast or Home Depot, but I’ll have been there seven years in July and the new has definitely worn off. I still love what we’re doing there, and I love the humanity of the place (you don’t get fired for being nineteen seconds back from a break, for example), but I’ve never been promoted and haven’t gotten a raise in years. Doing dishes and cleaning grills isn’t exactly stimulating, and I sorta thought that by now I’d be in charge of a department or would be doing fun admin shit, maybe in design & editing, or HACCP or documentation & training or whatever, but the place is still run exactly as it was when I started: more or less like a hobby.

Which is fine, but there’s no path for advancement and without a promotion into an admin job that doesn’t exist I’ll never get to sit down! And I’m pushing 60 and would very much like to sit down, if I’m honest, please.

I sometimes think about getting a ‘real’ job, but I have no idea if I’m qualified for anything grown-up anymore. (I’ve been out of IT forever and it’d probably take me a week to set up Active Directory services properly! Heh.) And while it’s true the idea of a commute sucks, it’s also true that my IRA only has four grand in it. I figure something will fall into my lap eventually, because it’s usually who you know more than what. Or not! We’ll see.

I want my backyard to not look like shit, but I also want to not have to go out there in gloves and boots and pull a bunch of milkweed out of the gravel myself. I’m going to ask if the lawn guys will do it this month, before mowing gears up in full and they get too busy to help lazy people with stupid projects.

I also want to go back to Amritapuri again this year, but maybe not during peak monsoon season. I’m sure work would let me off again but I’ll have to see if I can afford it.

Trap, the feral ditch cat, recovered perfectly from her spay surgery, stayed five days in the guest room and was a perfect guest, and now hangs out with me all the time. I get the impression she thinks I’m an extremely stupid and lazy cat, but I keep ‘finding’ food so she’s willing to tolerate my lack of running around the neighborhood at night eating birds or whatever.

Sometimes she tries to boss us around by marching up to one of us or into a room and yelling, but since we don’t know what the hell she’s saying it never works. Most of the time she naps inside or on the patio couch. Yesterday evening I caught her playing, actually playing, with some dry leaves. I’d never seen her play before, not even when she had kittens.

So, yeah, I’ve been adopted by a fucking cat. I did not want a cat. I don’t even like cats. They’re an invasive species, they walk in litter boxes and then on your kitchen counters, they’re assholes. Fuck cats. I’ve seen this particular cat torture half-dead rodents, and I once listened to her eat an entire bird, skull and beak and feathers and feet and all! Disgusting! The cat is a terrible species, awful, just nasty. Buuuut I just feel responsible for her now and she purrs and is soft, and she’s happy to see me when I get home from work, so yeah, I love her.

What I should do is get a fucking goat, to eat all the weeds in the back yard!