"Chickie" papers

For the past month I have been working at a truck parts/ repair company sorting paperwork and updating price changes. It has been slightly nostalgic. In the years I went to work with Dad on the weekend to get me out of Mom's hair, sorting paper was always a big part of the day. What exactly I did is a little vague in my memory but I remember my fingers being black from the carbon copies. Now my fingers are dried out from ruffling through the paper and a little sore from removing staples to get to all of the copies. It seems that if the invoice bottom line doesn't match the PO bottom line it gets tossed over to my boss who among other things keeps the databases current. Since this is a company that has been on a buying spree acquiring smaller businesses how purchasing is done is pretty inconsistent. Now that the new owner wants to bring order to the chaos they are moving to centralized purchasing. My boss is the person making this happen - but in the mean time someone has to keep the 10 or so different databases up to date. Voila a job for me. In between I get to create mini databases for analysis by the new powers to be. Why you may ask am I doing this and it would be a very good question. It started out as a lark for a good friend who was beleaguered by this huge pile of paperwork growing on his floor and by the constant interuptions from head office for this or that report that was definetly not rocket science and was essentially taking information they had access to and making it pretty and putting it into a format they were familiar with, this while trying to focus on the bigger picture of converting the myriad of systems to a totally new system. I had grown quite lah de dah about everything and needed a reason to get up and put on clothes before noon and needed to keep my mind working. This has accidently turned out to be a huge aha for me. PS. Chickie papers (spelled phonetically) is a term coined by my sister to describe the piles or orders that she got to sort.

If you are only interested in the basic what have I been up to this past month, now is a good time to move on to another blog. It would be an especially good idea to move on to something more interesting if you definitely don't want to read my confession to total ignorance of real life. Come back later and I will write about my thoughts on being ADD and memory, and the link between my obsessive interest in blogs.

What have I learned. I am an hourly contractor and based on wages listed on local job boards am well paid for sorting through invoices, finding discrepancies and updating the computer files. It is 10 miles to work, only a handful of people work at this site, and other than the fact it is the old front office for a still active truck repair place. I think the space I am in was probably a parts store. There is the little problem of ever present fruit flies, don't dawdle when eating lunch if tomatoes are included, and the occasion eau de garbage when a fully loaded truck is towed in but by an large it is fine. Since there are only four or five women in the building and we were a recent addition the ladies room is spacious and always clean. The men's room is in the shop, no more need be said. By unspoken agreement office attire includes long pants, capri's on Friday depending on the weather, and tasteful tee shirts that promote past events like the Myrtle Beach Harley week, or Shag dance weekend are always in fashion. There are three people in office across from my work area, the human resources woman for the stores in our district, accounts receivable, and my boss. Because the company is getting ready to close the books for the year, they are trueing up the inventory and trying to convince stores to get rid of "stuff" that is haunting the dark corners of their shops. Having a father who never saw a still usable part that shouldn't be saved for future use, I have compassion for the store managers. But every time inventory reports are run and corporate sees stuff still lingering there is a barrage of calls. For some reason they think because the databases are managed here, my boss has some magic power to get people to scrap stuff, submit the tickets and take it off inventory. Listening to the calls has been like old home week. I almost volunteered to go to Richmond and tag inventory to ferret out the many, many engine and brake cores that never made it back for refurbishing.

Human Resources is another case altogether. It seems as if everyone is either personally getting hurt, or wife is having a baby or surgery, or relatives are dying. Workers Compensation injuries have a lot of paperwork, and you can't just fax stuff with personal information around anymore. No matter what I am never taking a job that involves Workers Compensation claims. Neither am I ever taking a job that requires me to tell someone that "you know they were close to Uncle Joe six times removed but no you can not get paid leave to drive you and your family to Tennessee for the funeral. You can take personal days if you have any left, or unpaid leave if your boss approves it."

She is also the person who has to fix discrepancies in time cards - as in they marked it as personal leave and they don't have anymore followed "by I know that before you were acquired you let people borrow against future time for something important but we can't do that anymore". That problem seems to take up a lot of time especially since store managers then have to explain to the employee that while it seemed like it was ok, now their paycheck will be smaller. I have now definitively made the decision NO HUMAN RESOURCES jobs ever.

All of this leads me to the big Ah Ha. I have become totally clueless about how the world really works. I have been self employed, other than a few unsuccessful forays into being an actual employee, for most of my adult life. All in all it has been a great life. Sometimes knuckle biting when clients are very very slow to pay, or a big job is wrapping up and another one is not starting. I complain about being at the beck and call of irrascable clients, the sometimes painfully long hours and looming deadlines but the upside has been that I have been able to work from anywhere. The internet and cell phones cut all leashes to having to be in a fixed place. And in the final assessment I have been well paid. There have been some projects where the scope got out of hand and I would complain that I was probably making $5 an hour if I counted all of the hours, but by month or year end our family coffers were topped up. I have never learned to equate hours worked to income. It's a job, you agree on a price and you do the job. Time became irrelevant. I would always say it is only time, it isn't like I have to buy more materials or pay for something out of pocket.

I am now being paid by the hour. All of a sudden I have started equating hours to getting my hair done, or a pedicure, or food, everything. It has been a sobering learning experience. I have not been grateful for the gift of finding work that was a match for how I work. I don't keep track of time, and can fall into a task losing my hearing, forgetting to eat, getting up after hours hunched over my computer stiff and happy that the task is done. There were days when after hours writing reports, I was just out of words and would come downstairs in bewilderment wondering if there is food in the house. When there were lulls in the project I would throw myself into house projects, or cooking inviting friends to be testers for new recipes from the latest southern living.

This whole learning experience has made me realize how hard it is so live with me. I am thankful for a husband who is reasonably tolerant of my foibles, my children who love or tolerate me. Now that I am no longer chasing the "perfect project" and always wanting to be the "go to girl" I am a little easier to live with. Maybe that is what retirement will do for me, I'll be nicer. I still don't go to bed when my spouse wishes I would since he does have a five day a week job where they expect him to log on and start work by 8:30, true it is in his office down the hall. So to my family or children who might have slogged all the way to the end, I am sorry for not being there when you needed me, or being physically there but obviously gone. I know there are many more things to apologize for, but there is only so much introspection I can do in one day.

 

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Hi, no, hi, ho, it's off to work I go

In April when I knew that my world was imploding I made the decision to take a leave of absence from my "you must" self. I upped my meds enough that I could live with "I'll do it tomorrow" and left my opinions behind. It was nice, I didn't feel the need to fix everything, put everything away and tidy, I was very tolerant of dumb ideas and crazy opinions. My two cents could wait. I made it through losing Zed, kissing my grandson and his mother goodby as they boarded the train for California and beach week with five grandchildren, two step daughters and their spouses. But all good things must end. When I made the decision for a lah, de, dah life I set September as the target to be fully engaged and working.

Today I head out to a job in an office, I packed my lunch and put on my semi grown up clothes (it is a trucking company and this is a repair site) and am heading out to my first day of work. Hopefully I will last! It is an easy job tracking down orders where something is wrong with the data so it didn't load in one of their four systems, fixing the problem and then loading the data. A little sleuthing and a little data entry. I will confess it is a 30 hour a week job and one of our friends hired me. It is only for a few months while he is working on converting all of the systems to a single system. But it gets me up and dressed, gives me something to think about and brings in a little shoe money at the end of the week. Wish me luck!

 

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Things I have learned from a five year old

Things that actually do not have limits

• Energy
• Imagination
• Determination
• Perseverance
• Negotiation
• Joy

For the last three days (a nano second for all full time parents) Ashby has been visiting by himself. Mom is in Baltimore waiting for the movers, and Dad is in Augusta finshing up a course. First he has been amazing, second he has reminded me that children are amazing.

 

He is a little World Cup fan so we negotiated a good nap in exchange for staying up to watch USA play. Mike and some friends came over to watch so he split his time "helping" Uncle Mike fix his car and checking on the game and the appetizers. And like a trouper, after the painful last 20 seconds he came up to bed for a few stories and a kiss.

He has two favorite things - the pool and the possibility to playing with the girl next door. Tess has a pink Jeep and a sense of humor, the pool is the gateway to magic.

The pool. More than anything he wants to join the fraternity of boys who walk off the edge with abandon. He studies them with the intensity of a scientist searching for the key. Do they hold their nose, do they pull up their knees, do they stay near the safety of the edge? For the past few days he has been dancing closer and closer to the goal. Step 1. Abandon the noodle - test where he can stand on his feet and where he can touch on tippy toes and where he can bounce on his toes and still keep his head above water. Back and forth he has gone. Playing catch with Grandpa and Mr Norm, inching closer to the limit, ready to reach back to the Nana who was his shadow, smiling with that little gleam that says, see I did it. Step 2. Playing in the zone. Starting with tossing the ball, and then studying the older kids who were using a Princess kick board as a bat for pool baseball. After they headed out and left the kick board, we played baseball, and then he toyed with jumping on the kick board. Just as I thought we were packing up the Tennis Camp kids and their counselors arrived. Oh what an arrival. Twelve 6 -12 year olds descended on the pool like banshees, and he was enthralled. They were tossed into the pool like laundry bags and bounced back begging for more. A cadre of parents with the B team arrived bringing wee tots and kindergarteners to the mix. And then the most alluring person of all came on the scene. An obviously younger brother came into our zone and proceeded to hold his nose jump in, thrash the 18 inches to the steps and get out, only to repeat the process over and over. Here inches away from my warrior was the challenge. Having survived one quasi accidental cannon ball from the second step that dunked him, he grabbed the kick board and demanded to try to launch himself off the steps time after time. I never knew you could launch, catch, kick and return to repeat in less than one minute. As the kick board holder I was impressed. Each time as I held the board he tested himself. Only the Adult Swim whistle saved us and sent us home. A swim meet kept us from going back later in the afternoon. Weather permitting we are back in the pool tomorrow.

The second lesson is friends rock. Yesterday he met our neighbor child who raced cars with him for an hour. Pink Jeep against Silver BMW. Sadly she was not available today since she had a sitter and another child visiting. It broke my heart to see how much he yearned for a friend no matter how transient. Tomorrow we will see if we can negotiate friend time.

I realize I don't have the fire he has to keep trying, dancing around the challenge, defying the odds each time he leaps for the board, hoping for the friend to pop out on the driveway. It made me realize that my only gift is to keep holding the kick board, no matter how long, to ring on the doorbell and see if she can play, because he is ready and eager to join the fraternity of boys who just jump in.

Years ago there was another golden haired boy who wanted to jump in. My only hope is that I gave him the courage or at least didn't stand in the way of flying.

 

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Dear Mom

I l know i haven't written in a while. Wish I could say I was busy but more that I have been pre-occupied. Bruce and I are in SC for the annual event. It has been fun and the guys are tied for first place. Hopefully tomorrow they will play well and their competition will have a few bad holes.

I finally finished installing the drip system for the front and back hay racks. No plants but the irrigation is ready. Every step seems to take forever. I can't work in the heat anymore, after the heat stroke last summer I have to be really careful. But I am determined to get them planted this week. I'll send pictures.

When I look at my house today, I wonder where I went and I haven't cared enough to finish the family room. It makes me remember the year you had the house painted and the new carpet installed. I came to visit and you had not rehung the pictures and I worried about how you were feeling. I understand now. In the scheme of things, it was so unimportant. But I guess it isn't. How our nest feels when we walk in the door sets the stage for everything else, and how we make our family and friends feel when they come in is important. I need to up my game.

Our friends in SC have a new puppy/dog. He is 18 months and cute. But he is a dog, he isn't Zed. I l know I should want to love him up, but I don't. I think I feel more like a dog trainer and want to give suggestions but I don't want him to sleep with me. He isn't Zed.

A few weeks ago a friend gave me some advice about how you go on when the rug is pulled out from under you. We have all lost parents, children, pets, jobs, the touchstones of our lives. We are adrift, our compasses are askew, the things we loved and hated are gone. She said, go everywhere you are invited, be good company, bring a good bottle of wine, thank them for inviting you. Life is short and the pain of loss is paralyzingly, pull up your big girl panties and behave the way you want others to see you and you will grow into that person. Years ago when we lived in Pictou and had a neighbor who was the bane of our existence the advice I got from my friends was treat her the way you wanted her to be, and it worked, within several months she changed and I changed.

I want to be the person who I was, someone welcoming, whose home is comfortable and friendly. Mom, if you are listening, help me let go of my sadness and fears and be that person. I miss you everyday. I miss knowing I could call you and you would patiently listen. I miss knowing you always thought the best of me. Tell Dad I love him.

Love, your daughter.

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Dear Mom,

It has been two weeks since we lost Zed. I know I should have told you sooner but I still can't talk about it without crying. I told you he has been getting weaker and the vet said it was just a matter of time. I had brought him to Baltimore the week I came to have lunch with you because I was afraid to leave him alone and he was too sick to stay with the dog sitter.

I know people always say "my dog made me a better person" but he really did. I loved him, I thought about him, and he loved me back without reservation. He loved Bruce best. Bruce spoiled him, he gave him cookies and let him walk willy-nilly across the street. On trips he thought he needed to stop every two hours. I was the tough one. Always saying don't give him so many cookies he is getting fat. When we walked I told him to stay off people's lawns.

He filled a void in my life with his presence. When I drove up he was in the window waiting and would be down the steps to the door to meet me. I could be gone an hour or a week it was always the same. I didn't appreciate how much that meant to me until he was gone.

Some times I think he gave me permission to grieve, to cry for all that has been lost, for you and Dad and Zed. I always tried to keep the stiff upper lip and not be someone others had to tip toe around lest I fall apart but somehow with Zed, I can say "please don't ask me how I am, it is too hard".

It is too hard to lose everything. There is no reason to go home to Baltimore anymore. I am just from there once upon a time. I don't have to plan my errands around Zed's internal clock of 3 hour walks. I can be gone all day and it doesn't matter. I went to the beach with Judi last week because it didn't matter if I was home.

I miss you. I so wish I had actually picked up the phone and called you all the thousand times I thought I should talk to Mom. I want to believe you and Dad and Zed will be there when I cross over the Rainbow Bridge.

Love,

Your daughter

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Domesticity is highly overrated.

I have been home without any "work" since Thanksgiving.  There was a small project that took a few days in February but other than that I have been searching for meaning in cleaning out closets, shredding old files, scanning in pictures from the many boxes, scouring magazines for interesting menus to try.  I am planning healthy menus using an excel sheet so,I don't end up with 6 cans of basil/garlic chopped tomatoes on sale for the unbelievable price of 6 for $3.  I have purged my cupboards of questionable plastic containers, out of date ingredients and spices I brought from Canada (just kidding).  

A trip to The Container Store yielded shelf liners for my wire pantry shelves, an ever so clever divider that let's me stack my sauté pans, another to let me store the many cutting boards, pizza stone and cookie sheet rack.  Now they stand neatly on end waiting to be plucked for use.  And not to be ignored another divider that let's me store the casserole pans, and deep dish pie pan without stacking, and a cute extra shelf to separate my Polish Pottery casseroles.  All of this has led me to believe I am addicted to cooking containers.  This resulted in the mental challenge of incorporating these wonderful, unique containers in MEALS.   

I am starting with the ones that are more suitable for a family of two.   A La individual chicken pot pies in the au gratin dishes, broiled scallops and shrimp in the shallow ceramic baking dish, 2 person meatloafs in the small loaf pans lurking in the cupboard over the stove.  I am exhausted. I want to order pizza.  Planning menus that will use all of the fresh ingredients and leave no leftovers is exhausting.  My sweetie hubby is a willing test subject.  So far the majority of the meals have been winners, only one was horrid - way too much ginger.  I NEED A JOB!   

The Fence

We have lived here for almost ten years and I have enjoyed the view from the deck across my neighbors yard to the 11th fairway and to the trees and sky.  My backyard includes a Winnie the Pooh woods that is a nice privacy block from errant balls but no wonderful long view.

When we first moved here I thought I would put up a fence but I could never imagine one I would like.  The HOA rules only permit a backyard fence that doesn't come out more than 5 feet from one side of the house and is set back at least five feet from your property line and in our case at least 50 feet from the rear edge that abuts the golf course.  It was a very unsatisfactory look and it would double the work of mowing and edging, and in truth our dog is a city dog who isn't very fond of wet grass and would much prefer a nice walk on a sidewalk. 

Until last year our neighbors were a family with young children who were wonderful to watch grow.  We miss them and their energy.  And the roasted marshmallows the kids would bring me when they had a fire in their firepit.  Our new neighbors are nice, they are quiet and not really outdoor people.  But they are fence people.  They have two dogs who are used to having a fenced yard that eliminates the need for walks.  To be fair, she works long hours and his work frequently takes him away all day.  They want a doggy door into a fenced yard so the dogs can come and go as needed.  Today the fence installers came and started digging post holes and erecting the fence.  It is a nice open black iron fence, it will work well for them.  But I suddenly became very protective of my property line.  They seem to have gotten a waiver to extend their fence out from the side of the house to cross their driveway and come up to the five foot set back from my property line.  I watched the installers eyeball the line and wanted to rush out and say wait, do you know where the property marker is because the line does not form a right angle!   All of my busybody thoughts came leaping to the front.  "Don't put the ends of the rods  into the grass, it will make it impossible to edge or use the trimmer."  "You are just eyeballing the setbacks and haven't even referred to the plat."  

As my hubby would say, it is not my problem.  If it is too close to the golf course someone else will complain and I never go down to that back corner of the lot so who cares if it is only a foot from the line.  I do miss the open yards.   Maybe I will plant a hedge.