I Feel Better Now. I Think.

I have been dealing with a killer ear infection since Saturday afternoon. Today is the first day I have been relatively pain-free. Yesterday I had to hand the phone over to my office partner to take a message for me, I could not hear out of either ear what the woman on the phone was saying. That was a bit unnerving. Hopefully by the weekend I will be back to my normal selective hearing!

This evening I came home from work and chose to lay down for just a minute. My husband came home a little later and last I saw of him, he was sitting in his blue chair in the bedroom. Somewhere between then and "nowish", I feel deeply asleep. I was dreaming crazy "Alice in Wonderlandish" dreams (wish I could remember it, I could use the material!). At 7:45, I woke up, looked anxiously at the clock and jumped out of bed, declaring to my "dressed for work" husband, "IT"S SEVEN FORTY-FIVE!!"

His droll and husbandly response? "I know." I then asked him in an accusing voice (since I have to be to work at 8:00), "Why'd you let me sleep so long? And slowly my dulled mind came to life as I realized the evening of my my present day had not yet passed. And boy, was I going to be messed up at bedtime.

And then? In that totally discombobulated condition, I stumbled to the den to read emails and watch this crazy video. I was totally awake by the time I walked that walk, let me tell you. In fact, to be totally crass about it all, if you will excuse me, I think I may need to go check my britches!

Close Only Counts in Hand Grenades & Horse Shoes

I don’t think I will be offered the job I interviewed for the Monday before last. I thought Francois (not his real name) said he was going to make a decision by the end of the week and I had not heard anything so I left a message for him on Monday and Tuesday to follow up. He had specifically said that he would get back with everyone so as not to leave anyone hanging and when someone says something like this I expect them to do it. However I must have misunderstood because when he returned my call on Wednesday he said that he was in the process of doing background checks on the first candidate and he usually did not tell any applicants what was going on until everything was finalized. But since I seemed so interested he wanted to let me know that I am third in a line of twelve applicants, hence my belief that I will not be offered the job. I imagine the position will go to number one or number two, unless he discovers that one of them was an axe murderer and the other was charged with income tax invasion or something equally serious! Nevertheless, I got practice in dealing with a formal interview and built my confidence level up a bit.

So, what was the job, you ask? Well, it was officially titled administrative coordinator 2 in our civil service language. The work would have been carried out in the History Department of our local university. The head of the department is a thirty-something PhD guy who is originally from France and has the accent to prove it. It involved a lot of varied responsibilities, including keeping several young professors in line as well as a couple of student workers and keeping track of the department budget and various and sundry other responsibilities, essentially running the History Department, in the words of Francois. I think I would have enjoyed doing most of that and I would have been a good fit for most of the duties involved. However, the pay was at the low end of the salary listed and worse, it was less than I am making now. If I had been offered the job, I would have lobbied for a small raise before I took the position.

There is another opening that I will apply for and we will see how that goes. I am looking at the civil service jobs because they do have insurance benefits and retirement, neither of which my current job offers. The real reason I am looking for another job is that is has become crystal clear to me that my ethics and the ethics of the people I am working for do not align and will never align. It has to do with taxes. I have seen and heard too much that I believe is flat out wrong and I don’t want to stay. It’s not my place to discuss their business on my blog so that is about all I have to say about that.

In the meantime I will be patient and take my time looking. I will not take the first thing I am offered and I will trust that the right job is out there for me, one that I will enjoy and will pay what I need to make--one that will be a good fit for me (Can you tell I have already had a serious talk with myself about this?).

Nervous Yammering

I have a job interview Monday at 11:30. I have to think of my excuse for why I am leaving work for a few hours Monday morning. I will run home and get dolled up (we wear company polo shirts and jeans where I presently work), go for the interview, run back home and get "undolled" and then head back to work.

I've kind of let my appearance (and my wardrobe) go in the last few years, so I had to put together an outfit, got a haircut, and put one of those temporary colors in my hair to color the gray (I've only done that once or twice before--I don't have that much gray!). To my surprise, the color lightened my dark hairs along with coloring the grays and now I have a reddish glow to my hair, which is what the box said the color would do. Actually the box said: use this color for "radiant color that will set you aglow". I don't know about glowing, but I was practically delirious laughing at my almost red-headed self as I was drying my hair!

Hubby was the one who said "maybe you should get some of that stuff and color your gray hair". He never tells me what to do, but in the past when I have colored my hair he has not been too thrilled with me doing so. So when he put the idea in my head, I jumped on it.

I had a weigh-in at Curves and I have lost 3 little pounds and a half inch in a couple of places and have lowered the amount of fat in my body. How they know I have lowered the fat, I do not know, but I will take all the positive news I can get. I am slowly making better food choices.

Forward Trajectories

In no particular order:

• I've been doing a lot of reading, particularly in a book called The Van Gogh Blues. It is about depression and the creative person. Linda of Quotidian Curiosities was intuitive enough to recommend it to me and Linda, it has been one enlightening book. Thanks for pointing it out to me.
• I joined Curves, the women's workout place. I am having trouble getting myself there as often as I ought to be going but joining is a start. We are also trying to eat more consciously at work.
  
• I finally got my phone line fixed. My problem was due to a short in the jack.
• I am looking into changing jobs and have sent two applications in for civil service jobs. I took the civil service exam Saturday and feel like I aced it. The whole idea of changing jobs is difficult for me because of low confidence levels and not much official training to offer. Also because I start feeling guilty about leaving the old job, even though I have good reason to do so.
• I am going to start work with a spiritual director very soon. I have been in a spiritual funk for quite some time now and I think the timing is right for me to do this, even though it is a tradition that is completely foreign to my upbringing.
• I have not been out to take photos lately but I hope to get back to it soon. The anti-depressant I have been on has really muted my creative desires, but they seem to be slowly coming back. I have also not done much in the area of "artsy-fartsy" activity and am looking forward to getting back with that as well.
• I want to get back to writing more regularly on my blog, but now I have blurted out all my news, what on earth will I write about?
  

First Quarter Report

It could be summed up in three words: sort of crappy. That's about all I want to say about that! Brighter days are surely just around the corner.

This video did make me smile...