imminent change

It’s a busy life for me lately.  Work is just insane – we are doing database migrations and another round of server standardization across the company.  It’s loads of fun when so many systems are integrated.  Like dominos, when one thing changes, so do 500 other things. 

My new teaching career will soon be launched.  I go sign a contract next week at an orientation dinner that all adjuncts are supposed to attend.  It’s interesting they are giving me this job and feel the need to treat me to dinner as well.  The pay is low, but I took the job to get experience.  For me at this point, the money doesn’t matter.  I have to say, even without the contract being signed, I’ve had more training and opportunities for training in the past two months than I’ve had in 34 years in my real job.  Training is just very low priority in the corporate world, but it seems very important in the academic world.  Probably so….education is their business.

Erin and Emily are preparing to go off to college.  Emily starts a week before Erin, and will start moving in NEXT WEEK!!  She began packing stuff into boxes last night.  Erin has made a few piles of things, but hasn’t done much else.  Perhaps when her boyfriend leaves town (he is going to college a week before her), she will find motivation.  He is a significant distraction at this point.

The universities the girls are going to have policies requiring all incoming freshmen to get a meningitis vaccine before they start classes.  Earlier this week, Emily and Erin went to the doctor’s office together to get the shot, one shot, but ended up getting four shots each before they left.  Emily told me the nurse “peer-pressured” them into also getting a chickpox booster, a hepatitis vaccine, and even #1 of the 3-shot series for HPV.  As much as Emily fears needles, the nurse must have been very persuasive.

I have to admit, I’m a bit paranoid about any vaccinations since Jack had such a bad outcome.  His tumor is giant and spreading to the inside of his leg now which makes it harder for him to walk.  We switched his food to some expensive little cans of fancy tuna and salmon.  He loves it but is still losing weight.  It’s not time to have him euthanized yet, but it will be in a matter of just a few more months perhaps. 

I’ve been working with Gracie to improve her leash manners.  She is improving!  We went for a walk last night in a place we haven’t been for a long time – this was her first test outside our yard.  Normally, she would have been completely ignoring me and trying to drag me along the whole time.  This time, she was much calmer.  Whenever she started pulling the leash, I’d make her stop and sit for a minute.  She sat a lot for the first 15 minutes, then she figured out it was my pace or no pace.  We only had to stop a few times for the rest of the walk, and one of those was when a deer crossed the road in front of us.

Miss Gracie

It’s already August now – where has summer gone?   Our vegetable garden is in full production of green beans, green peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes.  Someone is the only one in our house who eats tomatoes, so he takes a lot of them to his parents.  The corn will be ready to pick in about 2 more weeks.  Our garden is small, but it produces plenty enough for us.

I’m still muddling over all those logs in our yard.  Someone has no intention of helping me split or stack them, and it’s turned out to be way more work than I imagined it would be.  Obviously, age has taken its toll on me.  Back in my youth, that would have been at most a day’s work.  My fantasy is that someday I will build a nice fire pit in our yard and spend evenings sitting around a cheerful, crackling fire sipping bourbon and picking my guitar.  Yep…someday….after all those logs are split and stacked, and a fire pit is constructed.