Whiny Post #2,422,333

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Frog

Yesterday my unit held a much overdue meeting to divide up our work plan for the year. The year that started 7/1/08. I found that the course I had been told to work on was now back up in the air as to who was going to own it. It is an elearning course so it should be mine since that’s supposed to be what I do (well it’s really been just lip-service up to this point no matter how I try to push for it). I had already done some research on it. Now I’ve offered the research to whoever ends up with the course. I thought about contradicting my boss in the meeting but just didn’t feel like it.

Then we talked about some other courses and one of those is, in fact, mine–has been since I developed it from scratch. A co-worker offered to take it over so that one additional paragraph can be written. The paragraph is coming from a meeting the co-worker and the boss are having today with someone from our client organization. I was told about this meeting after it was scheduled and remarkably on the day I’m not at the office. Any mention of speakerphoning the conversation? No. I told the co-worker since I’ve been shackled with the course, I’ll continue to write it.

Then I mentioned again how the course should be elearning. Both of them disagreed but their arguments are as unheard by me as my ideas are unheard by them. It’s a course that touches people who perform on-call duties. If you are only performing those duties infrequently, wouldn’t it make sense to have a resource that you could go back to and refresh yourself? Instead of actually acknowledging that I may have something intelligent to say about the subject they start talking about how these on-call people should take the week-long course instead. That’s not our call and so I’m not even sure why it was brought up. Except to beat me over the head with their HUGE knowledge of the social service system. Which is something I’ve been very respectful about and have never questioned. I feel like I’m beaten with it like a dead horse.

So, for the next nine months I get to perform basic maintenance on a handful of courses, develop an online component for a system refresher course (I won’t be developing content–just taking what’s given to me and putting it into an online framework–this project will be “live” by February), reviewing one course and writing up a detailed explanation of why it should or shouldn’t be moved to online and sitting with my thumb up my ass. I broached the subject that this is not nearly enough work for a year but was shut down.

Furthermore, I also brought up the fact that we’ll have a captive audience of a group of people we never get to see in a system refresher course (the same one I’m turning into an online course) and we could possibly take 5 minutes at the end of the pilot sessions or the actual sessions to ask these people what they need to feel supported in the training environment. Shot down again. I pointed out that we’d have them in a room in small enough numbers that we could direct our questions to specific items and why not see if we can partner with and play to the strengths of system refresher course. Shot down. Then my last ditch effort was to point out we can capture their names off the course roster and then do whatever the fuck they want to do.

I was given some advice last week that I need to have something else in my life that I look forward to and love so that I don’t dwell so much on this hell on earth known as my job. I think there’s some wisdom to that and so I’m really trying to get back to my “I’m a rock in a stream” philosophy (the water flows by–as does the BS, but the rock may also change the course of the stream) and focusing on school and some as yet unidentified thing. By the way, the rock in a stream thing was eye-rolled by my boss. We’ve started to eat our young at work…a great environment, don’t you want to come work here too? How is it that I can like my boss and at the same time want to tell her she’s a shitty supervisor?

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Hot Sauce and hotter me

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Frog

When I got home from work today I had to process the tomatoes I picked on Sunday. Don’t get me started on all the freaking peppers still sitting on the counter. I decided to make a batch of hot sauce since it called for a pound of tomatoes (which is really not many tomatoes as it turns out) and 2 anaheim peppers and 2 habaneros. Whoohoo, 4 peppers in one recipe! Oh Happy Day.

I don’t normally wear gloves when slicing peppers but I’m not fool and fished some out for the habaneros. When I cut into them I could tell the gloves were a good idea because my eyes started burning from the fumes alone. I added everything to the pot, cooked the tomatoes down and then carefully put everything into the blender.

I should state for the record that using the blender with hot food scares me because I’m sure that the whole thing is going to blast off and burn the crap out of me and ruin the kitchen forever. I got over my fear and turned on the blender. The hand atop the blender was protected by a hotmat and an oven glove. The hotmat got a couple of specks of hot sauce on it but the counter top was toast. Somehow this happens to me on an infrequent but maddening basis. The frapping base was not attached tightly enough to the blender glass and so the shit leaked. All over the place.

I managed to salvage the day, though, by using my third hand that thankfully grew out of the top of my head. I got a plate to set the blender glass on and then poured the mixata into a fine sieve as instructed. Only our fine sieve is evidently the finest fucking sieve there ever was because nothing came out of it. I was totally overjoyed at this point.

I got out our itty bitty sieve and used that to extrude the sauce. I lasted about 10 minutes of gently coaxing the hot sauce through the tiny sieve and then said some other curse words and threw the remainder into the compost tin.

Even with all the problems I ended up with a decent amount of hot sauce, which, as per usual, I have not tried. Because then I had to move right into making more spaghetti sauce with the remaining tomatoes. I should probably go downstairs and make sure that pot hasn’t totally exploded all over the kitchen too.

Posted in Eating, Gardening | 1 Comment

I just kept shoving my foot in my mouth and I DID.NOT.CARE.

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Frog

My supervisor has three kids. One is a senior in college and one is a freshman. The other one is still in high school. Today I had to hear about how the freshman’s dorm lost A/C over the weekend due to the storm. Without using my filter I just blurted out I didn’t care that he didn’t have A/C. She gave me a look and I said that I never had A/C and I walked both ways uphill in the snow when I was in college. I didn’t even go there with the “my parents don’t have A/C in their house and I lived there for years” story.

Then she topped me with the actual walking both ways in the snow because she grew up in a snow-getting state. We returned to talking about her poor, pathetic son who has a box fan and his lack of A/C. I couldn’t take it and repeated that’s too bad–college rooms suck. I refrained from the rest of what I was thinking: College rooms are concrete block boxes that are slightly larger than prison cells. The point of college is not to sit in your room and marvel at the decor.

Besides I’m sick of her interjecting stories about her kids in conversations that don’t warrant another wacky caper starring her children.

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Nice Walk

Posted on September 8, 2008 by Frog

We needed coffee at home so I walked over to Rostov’s to purchase a couple of pounds of coffee. It’s so nice to be able to walk somewhere to buy things. I really miss having a permanent office on campus. My temporary office is located in our “headquarters” building but, sadly, the building is slated to be knocked down in the coming months. This end of the block will be a construction zone for awhile as a new building is constructed. Word has it that the School of Social Work will be moving into the new building and many say it’s about time as the old building is a crumbling mess. I’m not sure what else will be in the new building. Until the wrecking ball comes, I’m relishing sitting on campus twice a week this fall.

As I was out this morning, I decided to get some money out of the ATM. The first ATM I went to had a young man standing in front of the machine attempting to use it. Parents, please, educate your kids before sending them out into the big wide world. This ATM has a big flashing card slot and the kid didn’t know where to put his card. Since I am an old, bitter woman and not his mother, I went to the other ATM.

Yes, I left him floundering. I don’t approach people using ATMs whether they are confused or not because the space at the ATM is sacred–I’m talking to all you people who feel the need to stand too close. Back up. The invisible bubble around me is even bigger when I’m making financial transactions.

Posted in Generic Thoughts | 3 Comments

Hanna, kind of eh

Posted on September 7, 2008 by Frog

Hanna moved through yesterday and we got three inches of rain. The better-half and I remarked that if we didn’t know it was a tropical storm we would have just thought we had a big rain storm. The only casualty of the tropical storm was the garden. The tomato plants are mostly toast. The tomato plants overwhelmed their cages once and for all. I just went out and picked as many tomatoes as I could get to without sinking to my ankles in mud and once things dry out we’ll go in and pull up the plants.

The pepper plants may have a little more in them but I picked a ton of jalapenos, habaneros and anaheim peppers too. Truthfully even those plants may be pulled up and composted. We have so many peppers. The green pepper plants are about done as well. I think there’s one pepper still out there that could use a few more days to get bigger. The only plants that aren’t on the definite pull up list are the eggplants and the weather may be the end of them. They don’t like cool temperatures so I think once we start cooling off they’ll kill themselves off. Suicide in the garden.

Last night we made a riff on beef bourguigon and ended up throwing a whole habanero into the pot for about an hour, mabye an hour and a half. The pepper gave just enough heat to the dish but did not overwhelm. The dish was rich and perfect for a rainy day–even though it wasn’t cool yesterday it seemed appropriate to make a hearty meal.

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3823: gone

Posted on September 6, 2008 by Frog

I am wiping my mp3 player clean this afternoon. It’s in the process of clearing off 3823 songs/podcasts. I’ve been meaning to bring some sense of order to the player for months now. There are songs on there I love and never get to hear because they aren’t in the right playlist or the playlist is so long there’s no way I could ever hear one of my favorites. Even though this is a much needed clearing off, cleaning up process, it’s still a bit strange to wastebin all those songs (yes, I just used wastebin as a verb–you cringed here first!).

I’m a bit of a music whore and have had a hard time saying no to free downloads. No more. I’ve been on the righteous path of only downloading songs I really like for the past few months. The songs I get from my Paste subscription get a free pass directly to the player because after all this time, I trust their judgement.

Now that our project of taking every CD we own and transforming the tracks into FLAC format is mostly complete, I feel comfortable in harnessing those songs now for my player and being reminded again why we purchased all those CDs in the first place. It will be nice to call up Love is the Seventh Wave with a flick of my finger instead of hovering over boxes trying to remember where the Bring on the Night CD is. Although, I have to admit, I tend to carry that sort of information around in my head and don’t usually spend too much time hunting around. It’s one of those systems that only makes sense to me.

I think this task of bringing order to the mp3 player will be the last time I do this with this current player. It is a Creative Zen M and it is no longer made or supported. It’s a shame really because overall I really like the player and the way it operates. We went to the local Apple store the other day so the better-half could buy some parts for a client. I told him when we’re ready to make the switch to an iPod, I don’t want to go back to that store because as much as I like technology and cool design the sheer volume of people in there drove me nearly crazy–too many people standing way too close (although the dude who waited on the better-half did whip out his hand-held register and we never had to wait in line–so awesome).

The cleaning off process just finished. Now for the rebuilding process.

Posted in Listening | Tagged | 3 Comments

Comments

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Frog

For some reason, the spam catcher is currently catching every comment as spam. Not even putting it into moderation. SWEEET. Way to go Askimet and WordPress (Brownie you are doing a heckava job). If you are leaving comments, I will get them out of the spam catcher and move them over.

Posted in General Spleen Venting | Comments Off

Maybe my last snark about him & her was wrong

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Frog

Maybe I shouldn’t have referred to JohnMcCain as a devil in an earlier post. Maybe the VP nominee is the actual devil. Jeez, republicans which is it? Family values and the church or just shitting down the necks of anyone standing in your way? And, as far as I’m concerned, book banners have a special place in Hell.

Updated 9/9/08: Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Posted in General Spleen Venting | Comments Off

Holy Cats! You know I love covers.

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Frog

Check out this list of 50 songs per artist to celebrate the 50th birthdays of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince. Sweet!

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Cleaned out the refrigerator

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Frog

Last night we cleaned some of the lingering items out of the refrigerator. This morning I packed a lunch that includes this wacky assortment:
1 can Barq’s Root Beer
1 jar of the homemade white bean dip
1 plastic bag of pretzel chips, everything flavor
1 container of leftover wheatberry salad
1 container of mini carrots
A knife and a fork

Who wants to guess how soon I’ll be hungry after lunch? Hopefully the bean dip will be filling enough to tie me over to dinner. The better-half and I are going out after class.

Speaking of class, I certainly hope I don’t have bad thoughts about my professor like I did last week. She asked me to talk about specific portions of my school blog and then she proceeded to talk over me the entire time. If she wanted to co-train, she should have said something. Instead my frustration level peaked at 10–it’s not like it took much to pump that level up last week.

Last night I put the jars of pickled jalapeno in our cabinet and I thought to myself that I didn’t even try the finished product before I processed them in a hot water bath. I hope they’ll taste good when we open them later this year.

I have tons of habanero and anaheim peppers already picked and, frankly, the peppers don’t seem to be letting up yet. I know we’ll make some more habanero oil but as far as what to do with the other massive quanitites of peppers, I’m not sure. I think we’ll have to figure out the dehydrator function on the oven and dry some. It’s not like there’s a big audience for hot peppers like there is for squash or tomatoes. You can’t just take a basket of peppers into the office and expect people to snatch them up.

Posted in Eating, Gardening | 3 Comments