Tonight I invented a variation on a standby at The Old Gray House. In French, it’s bœuf haché aux oignons et champignons en sauce béchamel. This name represents a great advance in sophistication over the original English title of “glop plus*.”
* The original dish, one from L’s childhood, involved hamburger and cream of mushroom soup. My improvement ditches the soup, adds the mushrooms and a couple of onions, an assortment of spices, and a from-scratch white sauce.
In 1971 my grandmother gave me a string bass for Christmas. The previous summer I had started to pick it up while at band camp, and I wanted to play with the stage band during the school year. The bass she found for me was was a King made sometime around 1940, one that belonged to the town optometrist, who used to play in pickup party sessions, but he hadn’t done in some time. Part of the reason he stopped playing was that one night he got drunk and fell over with the bass, cracking its neck and putting a hole in its side. When I got it, its condition was rough: the neck, the hole in the side, a dinged front, assorted chips from life as the equivalent of a barroom instrument. However, my band director had a recommendation for someone in Abilene he thought could get it into playable shape, and more or less that happened—it had a really high action and took a King Kong grip to play, but I managed to get some music out of it. Because of its overall shape and size, I named it “Aunt Jane.”
I played Jane mostly at home and at parties, using the school’s own bass (a Kay) for performance. When I went to college I took her with me, and she lived either at the Episcopal students’ association or in my closet for the next several years. It was in that closet that her next disaster happened: the Memorial Day flood. Jane sat in two feet of water for several hours, devastating her glues. Afterward, my college chaplain found money from somewhere to let me take her in and get her re-glued, which saved her body but did nothing to help her neck. Afterward I stood her in various corners of the apartments and houses where I lived, and let her just sit for years. I didn’t really have anywhere to take and play her, and she was so hard to play that it wasn’t worth it to me to try.
Fast forward to this year. My mother-in-law’s holiday check, which she sends instead of trying to guess at presents for us all, was especially generous and after everything else was taken care of, there was still several hundred dollars of “mad money” left, so I decided this was the year that I finally did something about getting Jane fixed if she could be fixed at all. I hauled her down to Violins Etc. and let them shake their heads and cluck over her condition, but in the end they thought trying to fix her would be worth the money. So I left her there with instructions to call me if it looked like the repair bill was going to run over $500, and they said “okay, check back with us in one or two months.” And that’s what I’m going to do.
We’re all at home and dishabillé as L wakes up and gets ready to go to work (contractors get to work the sucky holiday shifts) and M works on a jigsaw puzzle of Saint Basil’s Cathedral while watching Scooby-Doo. Yesterday turned out well for food, and for about as much family-of-origin interaction as I had a mind to; Mother and Chris (all that are left of the family) showed up in the late afternoon in time for dinner at 6:30, which gave L time to wash up the good dishes, which she insists on doing herself, before going to work last night. (I did say contractors work the sucky holiday shifts.)
Dinner was not very traditional, since Chris said he didn’t want to eat any more birds and could we have rib roast instead, please? So I agreed, and went out and bought a $93 standing rib roast, which is supposed to feed about eight—we originally planned for seven at dinner, but had cancellations. Around that we had Yorkshire pudding and gravy (well, it was a beef dinner), L’s orange-ginger cranberry relish, butternut squash gratin, broccoli in a nod to something green, and pumpkin pie. Everything turned out, except for one of the Yorkshire puds, which fell and got thrown away. It might have tasted all right, but it looked plain weird, and wouldn’t have reheated worth a damn; they get all leathery. After we finished eating, Mother and Chris went back to their hotel, L went to work, and I called TxAnne and Elisa, a Mensan friend in Dallas. Mother and Chris came by again this morning just before leaving for home, and everyone pushed on her about when she’s going to quit playing around at retiring and actually do it. She’s going to be 79 in two weeks, and is well past the point when she ought to have handed the library over, but she’s too much of a nut about control to let go of it.
Tomorrow promises to hold a trip to the library for M to return movies, and a trip to the hardware store after a new tin of metal polish. And if I get very excited, I might even uncrate and assemble my new(ish) compound miter saw.
L had a blowout in Quinn on the way to work tonight.
It was at least close enough that she could limp home to leave me the problem to deal with in the morning (before I go to the blood bank at eight-fuckin-o’clock), but still . . . .
Tonight is the first night L is turned loose from training and working independently. She had a rough period in the middle of training, because as she put it, the person who was training her’s idea of “training” appeared to be “the beatings will continue until morale improves” alternating with “look how much faster I can do this than you can,” a combination sure to grind down even the most optimistic. Fortunately, she had the sense to sit down and come to an Understanding with her shift lead about this, and after that the work environment got better.
Her new schedule is 2100 to 0800, Wednesday through Saturday. She seems to be adjusting fairly well to working through the night and sleeping all day, as she expected.
It’s taking a lot more out of M and me. M misses having L home in the evening while she’s still up (L is awake for maybe two hours before she leaves for work, well before M’s bedtime), and she still isn’t comfortable being at home alone after dark, even if she’s going to be asleep with the house locked tight, so the notion of me being able to do anything at all on weekend evenings is right out. There’s not nearly as much fun or interesting to do on Sunday through Tuesday evenings, and the more so if you have to do it alone.
All of this adds up to my feeling cut off from society, and that’s a very unhappy feeling. And I recognize that with jobs as hard to come by as they are, I shouldn’t complain too much and the situation can’t really be helped, but it still feels bad. I wish I could think of ways not to feel this isolated, but at the moment I don’t really see how.
I screwed up quite completely last week and paid the light-and-water bill twice, which meant I overdrew my checking account by $300. And even after I’ve rounded up every dollar I could from everywhere I could and poured it into the hole, I’m still $90 overdrawn until Thursday, which is when I get the paycheck that is supposed to pay the mortgage and if I do, it leaves me nothing for gas or food until mid-month. I suppose the mortgage will have to get paid in two chunks this month, which will make the mortgageholder unhappy, but can’t be helped if we’re to have anything to eat.
In other news, L continues to be “trained” on her new job, although she says the person training her has no clue about how to train, and his two modes of instruction seem to be “the beatings will continue until morale improves” alternated with “look how much faster I can do this than you can.” She’s trying to suffer through until he takes himself off to be an Enterprise tech and she can try learning the missing bits from the techs nearby.
And because of outages on my team, and because I’m either lead or backup for about four functions, I’m trying to be two different people through at least Wednesday, and doing that is No Fun.
About the only bright spot on the scene is a date with Paradox coming up on . . . Saturday, I think it is. Or maybe Friday. I can’t remember at the moment.
Yesterday I dispatched a record 74 exchanges in nine hours and a quarter. Today, I got half a dozen done and then the mainframe blew out two CPUs, leaving it down for the rest of the day. Fortunately I had other work not requiring the servers to be up, that had been waiting for a slow time.
I also applied for a business analyst position, which I seriously doubt I’m going to get—I don’t think I have near enough SQL experience for them to be interested. However, if nothing else I’ll get the experience of the application process.
At home today, and listening to the wood chipper grinding up the last of two trees I let Austin Energy take out for me—one because it was dead and starting to collapse into a 68K distribution line, and another because it was (a) invading the distribution line and (b) dying back from the top due to the drought. I made them leave the living part of that tree (a black walnut) to see whether it can recover, although I have my doubts with at least one more year of drought predicted, and maybe as much as another decade of low rainfall.
The sleep study went better than I expected. I actually did get to sleep about eleven and stayed that way until they woke me at six, then bathed—the center has a full bath, so you can wash off all the conductant before you leave—and came home, where I went on to sleep much of the rest of the day. My follow-up appointment isn’t until late in November, so I still don’t know whether they found anything worth the telling.
Now that H-hour is fifteen hours away and I’m certain it’s going to happen, I can say this:
L starts training tomorrow as a contract Minion at the Empire.
She’ll have two weeks of training, and go onto the floor as an email-based call director working third shift. The third-shift part doesn’t bother her, since she’s always preferred to stay up most of the night anyway and sleep until nearly noon. And with a late enough start time, she doesn’t have to give up her square dancing.
None of this would have happened without the efforts of my dotted-line manager, who pulled strings and talked to the right people, and got L’s name in the places where it needed to be. I’m thankful to work for a manager who would go out of his way like that.
For several months, I’ve had trouble getting myself awake in the morning. I can usually manage to drive myself to work without feeling I’m going to fall asleep at the wheel, but I have momentary problems focusing my eyes on the road, and once I get to my desk it’s nearly guaranteed to take thirty to sixty minutes and the second mug of coffee before I’m not falling asleep over the keyboard. That’s not normal or right.
I mentioned it the last time I saw my psychiatrist, and after going into the history he recommended I go to a sleep specialist for evaluation and maybe a sleep study, to rule out apnea and similar. So that was what I did today—went to the specialist’s office and saw one of the nurse practitioners for an initial workup. She looked at my file, allowed that my medication list didn’t have anything that would explain how I was feeling, looked in my mouth and listened to my lungs, and finally decided that yes, a sleep study was the logical next step, and she took me out and had the scheduling clerk set up a study for next Friday week. I hope it goes better than when I last had one of these, about 1995—that time I never could get to sleep properly, and we didn’t find out a damned thing.
Get your Badge!