About Me

Life is learning. Life is change. Life is good. Life doesn't have to cost a lot. I want to make my life greener, healthier, and thriftier. And I want to enjoy doing it!

Monday, February 21, 2011

Monday Thoughts

Life is, as always, interesting, sometimes entertaining, often complicated, and full of choices and tradeoffs.

I really want to get my current knitting project finished.  I'd like to be able to wear the sweater to work while it's still cold enough to wear a sweater to work ... and I already have the yarn and pattern for the next one.  Which will be pink, so it's even odds sister S will try to talk me out of it, or into making one for her.

I really want to get my workroom completely cleaned out and reorganized.  But that uses up knitting time ...

I have three shelves full of books I haven't read yet.  Quite a few of them are hardcovers that are too bulky and/or heavy to carry to work and back every day for train reading.  And every time my friend D comes over for our weekly movie-or-board-game night, he brings more books to lend me.  I read on the train, I read through my lunch hour, I read when my hands cramp up from too much knitting (is there even such a thing as "too much knitting"?), and the books still pile up faster than I can whittle them down.  I'm like Robert Heinlein's character Hilda Corners in "The Number Of The Beast", who said she read in bed, she read while she ate, she read on the john, she read in the bath, and she'd read in her sleep if she could figure out how to keep her eyes open.

I have a lecture series on DVD that Mom lent me, and another one she bought me for my birthday, that I really want to see.  I could pop them in the DVD player while I knit, but they're subjects I like to give my full attention to ... I'm not so good a knitter that I can knit without paying any attention to what I'm doing.

For someone like me, an embarrassment of riches!  It makes me wish our lotto pool at work would win big, so I could say goodbye to working for a living and have, finally, enough reading/knitting/sewing/everything time.  I could never be one of the "idle rich"  -  life is just too full of interesting things to do/see/hear/learn, and not nearly full enough of time for them all.

*****

Am I a bad person because I enjoy watching someone with a highly inflated sense of their own importance shoot themselves in the foot?  Especially people who've grown a sense of entitlement where they should have cultivated some kind of work ethic?

Two weeks ago, our office hired New Kid.  The Monday he was supposed to start, he called in sick.  Well, things happen, benefit of the doubt and all that.  When he did show up, he seemed from the start to be very young  -  in attitude as well as age  -  and very, very full of himself.
The following Monday he called in sick again.  Hmmmm.  He also had to be warned more than once during the week about things he was doing when he should have been doing what we hired him for.  Warnings he apparently didn't find worth taking seriously.  And frankly, he wasn't nearly as good as he thought  -  and said  -  he was.
Today, Monday, the beginning of his third week with us ...yep, you guessed it.
If he shows up tomorrow, he'll be handed his final cheque and told not to come back.
We amused ourselves speculating on whether he has quit but doesn't have the cojones to say so to our faces, or whether he was too hung over to care what we thought and is counting on coming in tomorrow morning as if nothing had happened.  I guess we'll find out in the morning.  It certainly is glaringly obvious that he has no idea what being a full-time employee in the real world is all about.  He's currently pursuing a business degree (evening classes) and fully expects that as soon as he has that diploma in his hand, companies will be lining up outside his door with high-paying career offers.  Yeah, good luck with that.  Especially since our field is not thickly populated, sooner or later everyone in the industry knows everyone else, and word gets around ...

*****

It's slushing outside.  One minute it's snowing, the next minute it's raining ... if you don't like what's happening, wait five minutes ... it'll change.  Nasty.  I wonder what it'll be doing in the morning?

*****

Exchange between two daughters and me earlier this evening, after I had obliged them by stopping on my way home to pick up concert tickets for them:

"Yay!  We have concert tickets to see 'Favourite Band'!"

"No, I have concert tickets.  When you pay me back for them, then you will have concert tickets."

I'm such a meanie.

*****

I just realized something possibly odd about myself.

I remember learning to swim, and to roller skate, and to ride a bike, and to do cursive writing (a disappearing art these days, it seems).  I remember not yet knowing how to drive, cook, thread a sewing machine, ice skate backwards, or chop kindling.  I remember when we got our first television  -  a black & white Phillips, with the rounded green screen and "wood-grain" cabinet and rabbit ears sitting on top.  I remember the first day of first grade.  I even remember bits of my second birthday.

I don't remember not knowing how to read.  And I don't remember not knowing how to knit.

2 comments:

  1. When I read: "No, I have concert tickets. When you pay me back for them, then you will have concert tickets" I felt I had found a kindred spirit. That's just what I would say to MY children! And everything you remembered I remembered too, and I don't remember not knowing how to read either.

    So I read as much of your blog as I could this morning before I had to head out, and I can't wait to read more!

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  2. Nice to know I'm not alone :-) Especially after being a weekly winner of the "Meanest Mom In The World" award for the last few decades!

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