Occupy Austin, Hallowe'en edition

Moving house

Yes, I got this photo from the web.  It's MY HOUSE.

You knew it was coming.  I had to change the blog title.

I'm going to be changing the url, also.  The new address will be shutuptexas.blogspot.com.  For a few days, I'm going to leave it where it is, just to give people a bit of a heads-up.  Maybe I'll try to hang onto both for a while.  I still plan to do No Dairy January in 2012, so if you're here for the anti-cheese stories, hang in there.  It will be extra-fun trying to avoid cheese in the land of tex-mex.  (Shut up, Texas!)

It's only fitting, since John and I made an offer on a new house last week, and we're now in that lovely period of back-and-forthing with the sellers.  They are nice people, and the house is in incredibly good shape.  We like it.  We should close around the first week of December, and have the rest of the month to get out of the apartment.

So, all three of my followers: love you!  Come with me to the new place.  And come visit me in my (real-life) new place. We don't have any furniture, but you can help us scrape the popcorn off the ceilings.

Occupy Austin

I went to the first Occupy Austin protest yesterday.  I was going to go to the one in San Antonio, but I was on the way downtown when I heard a report on the radio saying that the Occupy San Antonio group was going to march to various locations around the city, and one of them is the large corporation that I work for.  Heh.  I decided to go to Austin.

I got to Austin City Hall around 10 am and stayed till after 6 pm.  It was really, really fun.  I took about 700 photos, and I saw a lot of people with a lot of hope.  I have to dig pretty deep to find hope in myself, for my own life and for the lives of future Americans, but yesterday felt good.

I got sunburned, I ate an awesome sandwich for lunch, I walked around Austin, stopped at Whole Foods on the way home for cookies, wore myself out and slept like a rock.  Woke this morning and heard rain drizzling outside, so I slept for a few more hours.  Went to work in a decent mood, and--surprise!?--had a pretty decent day.

I didn't get the job at the bookstore, so I'm going to have to resign myself to the hotel.  I guess it could be worse.  I work with good people.  I work indoors, in decent clothes, for relatively fair wages and benefits.  I don't practice enough.  I'll figure it out.

Short walk

I got off work at 7 tonight and decided to walk around a little before I went home.  It was still hot, but about to rain.  I miss rain.  I walked down along the Riverwalk and ended up in a mall--yep, when I try to go for a walk outside, I end up in a mall that has a river in it.  I came out a different side of the mall, totally turned around, in a very touristy area full of shops and neon signs.  But--wait, isn't that...?  Oh, right.

The Alamo.

I watched two Segway tours battling for cleverest dance-pose-while-rolling in front of the Alamo.  I kept walking, reached the corner and almost got knocked off my feet by a blast of wind when I left the shelter of the building.  It was a serious Texas-sized wind, y'all.  I had to lean forward to walk into it, putting my arm over my face because I was getting scoured by tiny pebbles and bits of dirt.  Just as suddenly, the wind flipped to the opposite direction and pushed me up the street, blasting the backs of my legs with the bits of dirt.  The sky got darker and darker, and I opted to head straight to my car instead of finding a bus stop--I would have had to take the trolley all the way around downtown and back up to the park-and-ride, so I decided to take my chances on getting caught by the bus stop police.  I figured--and I was right--they wouldn't want to be out in that wind.  Driving home, I watched the most intense electrical storm coming in from the west.  Then I sat on the patio for a while and listened to the thunder and rain.  

I won't be sorry to get away from this apartment--the water changes at random intervals from scalding to lukewarm.  Or, if you put it on lukewarm, it changes from lukewarm to fricking freezing.  Or!--like today, the water just got shut off with no warning.  My shower drain won't work properly, no matter how many times I call maintenance.  Oh--and did I tell you about the drip from the light fixture in the hallway?  There was a tiny drip coming from the light fixture in the hallway for a few days.  It made a tiny little orangey-brown dent on the hall carpet.  Then it stopped.  We assumed it was something leaking in the pipes, since they were working on the pipes that week.  Then John asked the upstairs neighbor, and he said oh right, they had one of their toilets back up and flood their bathroom and hallway.  WITH POO WATER.  Which dripped through our light fixture into our house.  So, the house search is on with a vengeance.

That said, we have the perfect patio for listening to a storm.  It's sheltered from the wind, so much that my wind chimes don't even jingle, and the rain doesn't come in unless it's really pouring.  I sat out there with The Dude and our latest patio cat, The Jesus, for about half an hour.  Then our Mexican delivery showed up and we had dinner while watching Parks and Recreation on Netflix.  I don't work again until next week.  Life has been worse.

Why

I got to go back to brass band rehearsal tonight, and I got to hang out afterward.  I haven't hung out for a while, because my depressing job had me getting up early, or staying up late, or just generally not cheery enough to want to hang out and drive home afterward.  Tonight I went out.

I really like my band.  Have I said how much I like my band?  I like my band.

They asked about my depressing job, so I told them a little about it.  I think, in the last twenty-four hours, I've tried to explain about five times why I'm doing the depressing job.  I guess it's not clear to everyone why someone with my career path and experience would take this depressing job.  I thought it was obvious--need money, get job--but so many people are asking me why that I'm going to try to explain.

My career--the music teaching one--is not really flexible in its hiring seasons.  Band directors are looking for teachers at certain times of the year; colleges are hiring adjunct faculty at certain times.  While they may be looking in July/August, they don't exactly put ads on Craigslist.  They hire, at that time of year, by word of mouth.  Often, some teacher has moved or gotten a full-time job somewhere, so his/her previous employers hire someone else they know away from another school, and that school hires someone else and so on until the very last school is suddenly in a desperate place, with band camp starting in two days and nobody to call.  They will ask other teachers in the area for names, and usually something will come up.  I have gotten all of my college gigs and most of my other teaching gigs in that way: someone asked someone else and got my name.

(There *are* jobs that require applications and curriculum vitae and auditions and interviews.  Those jobs are usually announced in the fall/winter and involve a search process, and usually result in someone getting a job and leaving some other school in the lurch.  Then the shifting process starts, some school down the line gets screwed in mid-July and I get a last-minute call for the gig.  I never get the jobs that involve applying.  Most require a doctoral degree, and even if they don't require it, many of the applicants will have one.  It's why I want to go back to grad school.  I will never get a full-time job, let alone a tenure track job, without a doctorate.)

I moved to Texas in July.  The perfect time for getting students and teaching gigs, maybe, but I didn't know anyone.  I still don't know many people.  It took four years for me to really get started in Georgia, and while I'm better at networking and promoting myself now, it's still going to take time.  I know that my name got out there at least once, in August, but the band director who got my name never called me.  I think he probably didn't recognize my name, so he tossed it in favor of someone familiar.  That is going to happen for at least a year.

As for professional playing gigs, they are few and far between for euphonium and trombone.  When people get playing gigs, they sit on 'em as long as possible.  I've been volunteering for lots of free gigs, which would get me into trouble with other pro musicians (some believe it devalues what we do--but you know what?  I can't think of a playing gig that I've ever had that didn't stem from some free gig, like my brass band).  I've already done more in two months than I did in a year when I moved to Georgia.  Still, I need a depressing job.

In a week or so, I might have two.  Depressing job number 1 has cut my hours drastically--you know I'm heartbroken over that--and I had an interview at a chain bookstore the other day.  I got a decent feeling about it.  The two jobs together would likely not add up to a forty-hour week, but would create double the stress when it comes to scheduling.  After so many years of my nightmarish teaching schedule, I'm freaking out about two part-time jobs?!  It's because, when I teach, my time is my own.  I set the lessons, I pick the days, I say (usually) when I start and finish for the day.  I can cancel if I have to.  Chain stores and corporate hotels?  They don't care about my schedule.

Depressing jobs.  All jobs are depressing jobs.

Vaguely personal, yet vague

When I write blog entries, I try to be clear.  I tell stories.  When I write in my journal, or for myself, I write faster, closer to the speed my mind works.  Ideas and feelings zoom around inside my head, or they're just there.  When an idea occurs to me, ideas and associations well up quickly and blend together, which is why I sometimes make off-the-wall comparisons or strange statements.  Like this journal entry from when I was 18: "My toes fit together like Little Caesar's breadsticks."  It's ridiculous, but it still makes perfect sense to me--and now that journal entry is an idea itself, so every time I drive past a Little Caesar's, I think of my toes, and the cover of that journal--it was a pale watercolor of flowers on a desk, and I found the book in my luggage when I left for my summer at Interlochen, just before going to college.  My mom had stashed it in my suitcase.

All that is stuff I would cut from a normal blog entry (or at least create separate paragraphs).  It turned out to be a perfect example of what I was trying to explain.  My personal writing is stream-of-consciousness, more William Faulker and less Mark Twain.  I just want to get as many of the thoughts down as I can before something else grabs my attention and the thoughts get crowded out by new ones.

I was cleaning up my desktop this morning and I found this doc from back in August that I'd probably meant to incorporate in my journal at some point.  I'd been catching up with a friend, and sent him this message, and then found myself staring at the keyboard...just staring.  I mean, I was STARING at the silver, reflective button on my laptop, while strange, ugly thoughts went through my head.  The next two paragraphs came out of it.  It might not make any sense at all, but it's what I wrote down in my "talking to myself" voice.

- - -- --- ----- -------- ------------- ---------------------

Message to Mike: 

I have actually found myself fantasizing about going back in time...not just me, but like, everyone just waking up tomorrow and it will be a year ago. I would change one thing, and that thing would change everything. I really would. I don't need to go back to college and redo my life; I'll accept all of the stupid shit I did up to the age of 35, but I want to do this last year over. If there were any kind of god, he would let me go back. So fuck your god, lady, and quit trying to friend me when all of your activities are 'putting the christ in christmas' or 'evolution is a theory cause rick perry says so.'

Sitting here thinking about the whole past year, how it was so packed and busy and just fucking intense.  It was intense.  Everything felt so real, and I was so worried about money and the future, and suddenly everything went to hell all at once, and six months just…like, every day went by at normal speed, but the whole thing now looks like a video that I know was shot in normal speed, but from a distance it’s just a blur of events and feelings and so much stuff going on. 

So I just saw the ceiling fan reflected in the mirror-silver “click” button on my laptop…the long part of the button shows the blades of the ceiling fan turning at normal speed, but the blades are elongated and it looks like they’re turning really fast.  The end of the button where it’s a convex curve, the blades are short, and they spin slowly, so it looks like three-quarters of the fan is spinning faster than the last quarter of it.  Just a really weird optical illusion.  And that’s what this summer is—the leftover three months where time is just dragging by, while the rest of the year seems to spin by three times in the space of that one quarter.

Cincinnati

I got out of Texas for a few days.  First, flew to Atlanta, where I visited my friend, Tom, and then the two of us drove up to Cincinnati for the NABBA board meeting.  Did that for a couple of days, checked out Cincinnati's Oktoberfest, then drove back and I flew back to Texas.  Put into words, it is a much shorter trip than I thought it would be.  I'd intended to stay longer in Atlanta and see more people, but when I got the job at the hotel last month I decided to make it a shorter trip.

Re: the job: the girl who hired me has quit, so all those things I said in my interview ("My schedule is totally flexible!  I plan on working here for 3-4 years, at least!  I have NO OTHER commitments at all!") no longer exist.  I can act as selfish and temp-jobby as I want.  Not that I WILL, but I could.

The board meeting was only a little frustrating; we usually line out a lot of projects that never get any attention the rest of the year.  Next year we'll talk about the same projects.  The organization is largely about running an annual competition, and we always pull that off.  We did push through our agenda to finish early on Saturday, so I got some cool photos of the street festival.

While I was in Ohio, John got a call from our real estate agent.  She was contacted by HGTV to be on one of their first-time homebuyer shows--My First Place--and she asked us to apply for it.  I'm not a fan of reality TV, nor of TV in general, but I'm a good sport.  I just asked them not to make me look fat.  (Good luck to them, lol.)  The schedule of the show looks like it might not work for us, anyway--they want to follow people through the entire buying process, but John and I have already started.  The show would want to film us over a 3-month period, but we want to be out of our apartment by the end of the year.  We'll see what happens.

Shut up, Texas (2)

I've thought it over, and I'm going to keep looking for another job.  Not quitting the one I have just yet.  Yesterday, I made an educated decision: though the hotel pays well, it is cancelled out by the time I spend driving, waiting for the bus, riding, walking, and changing into my uniform...then doing the same in reverse on the way home.  It adds two hours, unpaid, to every shift.  That means that an eight-hour shift pays about as well as any bookstore gig, and a shorter shift actually pays less.  There's a B&N less than 10 minutes from my house, not to mention dozens of other retail shops.  Short drive, no uniform, free parking.  It's a sensible thing.

Today, my work experience cemented my decision.  I went to work after two days off, noticed my schedule for the next week is totally workable--only three shifts: one evening and two overnights.  No problem there. For the past week, the hotel was slammed full of people for a large conference downtown--and yes, if you check the papers, you know what conference I'm talking about, and therefore which hotel I work in, but I'm hunting again, so who cares--and being trained on the job was a little sketchy.  There were three of us getting trained, and it was busy, so we mostly ended up stocking shelves and sandwiches.  I have a good work ethic in retail, so every time I needed something to do, I went to work on the shelves or the drink cooler, or I trotted to the bar to make sure they had enough sodas in the coolers, etc.  When the trainers looked around for someone who wasn't busy, they always saw the other girls, so those girls ended up learning more than me because they were handy when someone was ready to teach them.

Today was less busy, and I was told (just like I was told all week) that I would be training on the two most important areas: the register and the espresso drinks.  Well.  One of the other girls has been really stressed that she wouldn't learn drinks fast enough, so she has completely taken over the drink counter.  The second girl and I can't even get close to the drinks--the first one just keeps nudging us out of the way, grabbing the cups when they come up.  Also, the drink counter is a good place to be if you don't like stocking stuff (and who likes that?!) so the regular employees tend to park themselves there.  The register is where you get tips, so, again, the regular employees take over the registers.  And they refuse to train us using their own drawers--the hotel is SO strict about accountability that NOBODY will let anyone else touch their cash tills.  Even the woman training us won't let us run on her register, we just stand behind her and watch.  Customers love standing in line and seeing two girls in uniform doing nothing but watching someone else run a register.  And if the department head walks by, we can't just be standing there behind the counter!  We should be stocking something or cleaning something!

So I spent my time trudging back and forth, stocking the drink coolers and stacking sandwiches in various places.  Getting sandwiches from the kitchen on 2, bringing them down to 1 and lining them up on trays, taking some back up to 2 when they don't fit, bringing them back to 1 when we run out, checking 2 to be sure I got all the sandwiches, going back to 1 to see if someone bought a chicken salad while I was gone, taking the expired sandwiches back to 2, and so on.  Repeat for salads.  Repeat for pizzas. Repeat for fruit cups.

Today, the department head was there--she's my boss's boss, essentially.  She took us to lunch and told us some things we already had heard.  Said that they really want to "retain" us and they want to make sure we "succeed" at our training.  Then she decided, since we've been there a week, she would conduct our first evaluations on customer service.

She got a bartender to come to the coffee shop and pretend to order a drink from me.  I had to remember all the specific things not to say (don't say "help," say assist...don't say "sorry," say apologize...don't say "no problem"...don't say "hey"...don't say "have a nice day"...etc.).  Then I had to pretend to ring him up on a register, but I couldn't use the register because it had someone else's till in it--I had to tell that person what to do and pretend I was doing it.  She couldn't prompt me, which meant I couldn't do it, because I haven't rung on the registers yet, anyway.  I had to pretend to swipe his credit card.  Then I had to make his mocha, which was easy enough for me because I've made ten thousand mochas at another job, but I didn't follow their drink procedure and I didn't know where everything was, because I haven't been allowed behind the drink counter yet.  I told him to have a nice day.

When the dept. head came back from evaluating me, she held the chart where I could see it.  It said BETSY J. on the top and in big letters: NEEDS MORE TRAINING.

NO FUCKING SHIT.

I spent seven days as a goddamn gopher and then I got tested on the register.  Humiliating.  The head told me she knew it wasn't my fault, that we'd been "crazy busy"--well, yeah--then why did you do it?  I was pissed.  I cry when I'm really angry, and I wasn't going to cry in front of her, so when she asked if I had any questions or comments, I just said no and I left.  I have another two days off, and I'm going to spend them applying for other jobs.  Retain that, assholes.

Drudge

On the Riverwalk...taken when I was an hour early for work
(haven't mastered the bus schedule yet).

I had a last lovely few days of unemployment, and last week I started my new job.  Remember how depressed I was when I wasn't busy?  Well, now I'm busy, and feeling uglier than ever.  I always dislike day jobs for their complicated details: learning the ropes, getting to know co-workers, etc.  Usually, I am nervous all the time until I get used to the job, then I settle down into a mild dislike of the hours, the work, the boredom and the lazy or annoying co-workers, I might get into a decent mood and make a couple of friends, but after a while I start to really, really hate the place.  I blame all my problems on it and look for reasons to quit.  Then I do quit.  It's a destructive pattern, but I always tell myself that if I got a "real job"--which, for me, is a full-time teaching job--I would not follow the same pattern.  I don't know whether I'll ever get that kind of "real job."  It's recently occurred to me that my "real job" might be what I've done for the past 12 years: cobble together a few days of teaching college with a few days of teaching lessons and a couple days, or half-days, of a part-time retail gig.  I don't like that.

Anyway.  This is the most complicated job I've ever had.  I'm working in a hotel, with millions of departments and rules--my shop is a glorified convenience store.  I have a uniform which is surprisingly comfy and flattering, but I have to check it out, change at my locker, dump it back in the bin to be dry cleaned and make sure I have a uniform for the next day, when I might get there earlier than the uniform room opens.  I take breaks in a break room where breakfast is free, lunch is $1.50 and is paid for with the same kind of machine that we use to clock in--a fingerprint ID system, and there's always soda and cereal for free, if we don't want to pay the buck fifty.  I have a million little duties and ways I'm supposed to speak to customers and other employees.  The coworkers, so far, are mostly very nice.  I can tell which types they are: the responsible ones, the fun ones, the lazy ones, the call-in-sick ones.  There's one guy who annoys the fuck out of me--he always has to have the last word on everything; if you tell him to stop complaining he complains about that; if the manager tells him to do something, he turns around and tells me to do it, then can't understand why anyone would object, when he's just trying to train the new girl.

It's been forever since I worked for a large company--last time was the summer I spent working in the JCPenney optical department in college.  Also in college, I worked for a couple of regional grocery store chains.  Since then, I've only worked for independent business owners.  Honestly, I considered myself to be unemployable EXCEPT by small business owners--not counting teaching, of course.  I'm not used to having this chain of command, these rules and restrictions and breaks.  Sheesh, I haven't had a job with "breaks" in years--my bosses would say, "get all the work done, then chill out, but make sure the work gets done."  Need to run to the store for tampons?  Put a "back in 5" sign on the window.  Want to sit down and drink a coffee? Hell, what are you waiting for?

And parking!  Jesus.  I can pay $50 a month to park in the hotel garage; I can pay $5-$10 per day to park in a downtown lot, or I can park in the Park-N-Ride lot 5 blocks away and take the bus to the hotel.  The hotel gave me a bus pass sticker for my ID (which I have to show when I enter and exit through the employee entrance behind the valet station), so I've settled on the bus thing for now.  Maybe Santa will buy me a few months' worth of hotel parking.  Maybe I'll get smart enough to figure out the citywide bus system.  Maybe I'll get a visit from the gig fairy.

My feet hurt.  Naturally, I can't wear the comfy-but-hideous crocs that I wore at my last coffee shop--they don't go with the hotel uniform.  Kitchen workers can wear them, but I'm in the lobby with guests, so I have to wear respectable shoes.  I feel so old, complaining about my shoes.

Wah, wah, wah.  I keep reminding myself that I'm grateful to have a job.  It really does pay well.  I think my supervisors like me--I KNOW one of them does.  The little benefits are nice--they have raffle drawings for prizes all the time, and those free breakfasts, and good benefits for full-timers, which I probably will be, if I want it.  It's going to be rough work hours, but it's in a comfortably air-conditioned lobby with good security and, strangely enough, flattering lighting.  I'm just goddamn tired.

Guten Días, San AnTouristTrap

I woke yesterday morning at 7:15, despite having gone to sleep around 3, because there were some of Satan's Cicadas buzzing happily outside my window.  Normally I don't mind insect noises (provided they're coming from outside my house).  This was loud enough to wake me from a Tylenol-PM coma.  I lay in bed for half an hour, and then noticed the temperature on my weather app: 79 degrees.  79 degrees!  I hadn't seen it below 90 during daylight hours since I came back from my trip up north.

So I got up, got dressed and collected my wallet, phone, keys, cemetery notebook, camera, SD cards, camera bag, extra lens, lip balm, bug spray, and three kinds of sunblock.  I needed a bag to get out of the house--this is ridiculous--I WILL get back to my minimal house-leaving routine.  Anyway, I drove downtown and went to the City Cemeteries, which I hadn't seen yet.

They were ugly.  I didn't even take pictures, they were so ugly.  I miss my Rose Hill.

So I drove to a little fancypants neighborhood called King William.  It was not ugly.  I left my car at the corner of Madison and St. Mary's, and walked all the way up Madison, taking pictures of houses.  I turned a corner and realized I knew where I was, right near the Blue Star Brewery that John and I went to a while back.  I remembered an entrance to the Riverwalk there, so I figured what the heck, I'd check out the Riverwalk at 10 am on a Wednesday.  The only other time I've been there was Thanksgiving day, and it was PACKED.  So I found my way there, and discovered it was the less-traveled end of the Riverwalk, the scenic, park-like end, not the trendy sports-bar-and-overpriced-ice-cream-shop end.  I walked toward downtown on the Riverwalk till I got tired, climbed the Durango St. Bridge and took that shot of the river up there, and went back down to the river on the other side of the street.  Walked back the way I came, crossed back over to Madison Street, walked back down to my car.  Drove home.

All these directions are so I can tell you what happened when I got home.  My legs were tired, and I wondered how far I had walked, so I looked it up on Google maps.  Up Madison, over to Riverwalk, down to Durango St....and I was only about 2 blocks from my car.  I made a big U.  Then, because I was dumb and left my phone in the car, and I was scared of getting lost, I just followed my breadcrumbs all the way back.  I walked about 2.5 miles and only went .3 miles away from my car.

It was a nice walk, though.  I wish I'd known where I was, because I'd've kept walking into neighborhoods I hadn't seen yet, if I'd known how close my car was.

Oh yeah, the title of the entry is a goof.  Everything here is in Spanish, but it's plastered with German names and styles.  It really is a lovely combination; I like the personality of San Antonio more than any place I've lived, except maybe Ann Arbor.  (I still miss Atlanta.)  The Riverwalk?  Yeah, locals don't go there much.  There were runners and dogwalkers on the part where I was this morning, but it's not a place to shop or hang out, unless you work there.

Which I do, now.  Today I got offered that job that I interviewed for two weeks ago.  I don't know why they waited so long to call me; maybe they called a bunch of other people first and there was something bad about it.  However it worked, I got the job, and I have orientation next week.  I'm not going to write much about it here.  This blog isn't anonymous.  I will say it's in a hotel, I'm making coffee, I will probably be working overnight shifts.  It's on the Riverwalk--the trendy, overpriced end, of course.  I liked my coffee shop job a few years ago, and this will give me plenty of opportunities for people-watching.  It'll also give me a paycheck, unless I screw it up by writing about it on the internet.

Stargazing

I finally got my debit card, so I bought gas and went out the other night to try and see the Perseid meteor shower.  It supposedly peaked around midnight on Friday night.  I didn't have the slightest idea where to drive, since, you know, I'm not from here.  I headed for the Hill Country, out west of San Antonio.  I don't know how far into the hills you have to be to actually be in Hill Country, but I drove west until I was driving up and down some hills, and then I looked for a place where I could see Cassiopeia in the northeast sky.

(Cassiopeia is the one that looks like a W.  Perseus is below it.  No, I'm not an astronomy whiz; I just know where to look for the good meteor showers--for the Perseids in August, look at Perseus.  For the Taurids in November, look at Taurus.  Got it?

[Actually, I always wanted to be an astronomy whiz.  I just had other things on my plate.  Plus, I have ADD, and lying down looking at the sky without getting bored was more than I could handle as a kid.])

I drove around the hilly hill area, which may or may not have been in the Hill Country, looking for a place to a) see the sky, b) not get eaten by coyotes, and c) not get eaten by crazy Texan serial killers.  I found myself on a hilltop among some mansions...by the time I got there, I knew I wasn't going to see any meteors, because the moon was so full and bright that it might as well have been daytime.  Still, I found a stretch of gravel road where there wasn't a lot of artificial light and I watched the sky for a while.  Then I took pictures of the moon for a while.  Then I took pictures of the mansions for a while.  When I got tired of smacking mosquitoes off my ankles, I packed up my tripod and headed for home.  It wasn't until I got in the car that I realized there are scorpions in Texas.  "And snakes," says Tom.  Yes, and snakes.  "And spiders!" says John.  Yes.  There were probably snakes and scorpions and tarantulas organizing a feast as I stood there fiddling with the shutter release on my camera.  I was more worried that someone would come out of the mansion with a shotgun and ask why in the hell I was taking pictures of their house with a long lens at 1:30 in the morning.

moon, with leaves out of focus

moon, with leaves in focus

Mansion, with cool bleedy light painting

mansion, on 24-sec. shutter release

The Dude

The Dude is a girl.  Just so you know.

She likes the low-calorie Iams that I feed Fleck and Lily, but I think I'm going to get her something with more calories, since she's so skinny.

She likes to sleep in front of the apartment, in a little messy area under my kitchen window.  I'm trying to train her to come to the back door, but until today she would only come back there when I tempted her with food.  She'd eat, then go back to the front.  The upstairs neighbor's air conditioner drips down onto that place under the window, so there's a little puddle for The Dude to drink from.  Today, I gave her a dish of cold water at the back door and now she's been camped out on the patio all afternoon.

I'm scared she'll get pregnant, but I 'm hesitant to take her to be fixed.  The spay/neuter organizations "tag" the cats that are fixed by clipping about an inch off of one ear.  I don't want them to tag her ear.  She's tame, for pete's sake...she is going to end up being my outside cat, if she's not sick.  She doesn't need an ear trim...but if I don't let them tag the ear, they will know she's MY cat, not a feral cat, and they will charge me more than $10 to get her fixed and cleaned up.

Lily does not approve of Patio Cat.

Still alive

It seems like there should be tons of news and stuff to write in a blog entry, but I mostly just sit around my apartment.  I clean stuff sometimes, and I go to the grocery store.  Even that has gone away, because my debit card expired and the new one got sent to my address in Georgia, and it couldn't be forwarded.  So I can't buy groceries.  I sit around, check my facebook, read books I've read before, and eat popcorn.  John is either working or going to yoga or going out, so I have a lot of time to myself.

This week I started making to-do lists and sending emails.  I'm doing some work for the brass band association, and making some Texas contacts...and sort of half-way thinking of getting out of here next year.  Maybe.  I found out that the reason I didn't get the assistantship I wanted was because the dean of the school knew from the beginning that he wasn't going to give it to a euphonium player.  He's gone now, and there's a possibility that I could go for it again, with different results.

The sad thing is, I kinda like it here.  I miss my band and my friends, but I have a new band here and they think I'm great.  I've gone to three rehearsals and I go out with the ones who hang after rehearsals.  They've given me a lot of leads for other bands, most of which don't pay, but they'd fill up my schedule and put me right in the path of people who DO have gigs that pay.  I also had two interviews for a day job last week, and I know they're still interested because they checked my references.  It's not my ideal job, but it's a job, and I've worked in that field before...and I enjoyed it.  For the interview, I was waiting in a hotel lobby downtown and got stuck right in the middle of a huge mob because the Dallas Cowboys were checking in; they do their summer training at the Alamo Dome in San Antonio.  The downside of the job is that it's probably going to be the overnight shift, so that would suck.  I'd get some interesting people-watching, that's for sure, but I'd probably have to start an anonymous blog if I wanted to write about it, hehe.

I might have gotten a teaching gig for next week, working with high school students on their all-state etudes.  It came from a friend-of-a-friend-of-John, though, and the first friend isn't calling me.  I think he probably wanted the first guy he called, and I sound like a third-string suggestion, so he's not going to bother.

I befriended a cat.  The Dude is a female tabby who likes our front porch, and the food that I give her.  She's very sweet, and I think I might have an outside cat now.

I haven't gotten out to take a lot of pictures.  It's just too hot.  And I've been a little depressed, honestly.  Life goes on.

"Home"

One of the many birdbaths in my parents' yard.

The last two weeks were both fun and exhausting.  Five nights in Vermont; two at a campground in MA; three in Philly; three at a lake cottage in MI; two more nights at my parents' house in Michigan.  Eleven states, six airports, five flights, three host families (if you include my own), six baseball games--one in person, two band concerts, and one long-ass layover in Atlanta, which still feels like home.

Tom not only built the fire,
he took this picture of it.

I went camping for the first time.  I mean, I was a girl scout, but we always went camping in cabins, and usually all we did was watch Lisa's mom try to start a fire, and the other moms cook the food most of the way on a stove and then carry it out to the fire once it was finally lit.  Every now and then Lisa's mom would look around and point to six or eight of us in a row: "Touching your face, go wash your hands.  Playing with your hair, go wash your hands.  Hands on your hips, go wash your hands."  We kept our hands clean on our camping trips.

Crossing the George Washington Bridge

***There was one memorable winter camping trip where I really learned about myself--the difference between me and the other girls.  We had a toboggan and everyone was taking turns sliding down a hill.  There was a long wait while the toboggan sailed down, and a longer wait while the three girls carried it back up.  I finally clambered on with Lisa, the scout leader's bossy, "my mom is in charge so you do what I say" kid, and her spoiled friend Kristi.  I had to be in the back, because I was the biggest.  I was always the biggest kid--tall, which didn't mean "fat" but it meant everyone thought I was fat because I weighed more.  Or at least I thought I was fat.  Anyway.  We sailed down the hill, Lisa and Kristi screeching the entire way.  Toward the bottom, as the toboggan was slowing down, we suddenly swooped to one side and hit a tree.  All three of us toppled sideways into the snow.

Super-tall mums on the campus of
Ursinus College in PA.

I picked myself up out of the snow and laughed.  Lisa and Kristi lay in the snow and continued their incessant, hysterical shrieking.  They seemed ok until their mothers and everyone else came galloping down the hill and fussed over them, at which point they claimed they could not walk, and sat on the toboggan sobbing pitifully while the rest of us dragged them up that hill and back to the cabin.  Now, maybe they *couldn't* walk--maybe they really were hurt--but they weren't so hurt that they couldn't march around the place later, bossing us in whatever games we played the rest of the day and running to be first in line for some half-burned, half-raw pineapple upside-down cake.

Amazing shoo fly pie.

What I remember most was the disgusted look on Lisa's mom's face when I stood up, unhurt.  She really glared at me, and the rest of the troop didn't seem to like me much, either.  I was used to being glared at by adults; I was a little smarty-pants, and a clown to boot.  A deadly combination of trying to seem smart and also being disruptive.  In any case, I spent the rest of the weekend keeping my head down, staying in the back of the hand-washing crowd, and looking forward to quitting scouts as soon as possible.***

Water skier on Vineyard Lake, MI.

So.  Real camping for the first time.  Mostly I kept my head down and stayed out of Tom's way as he put up the tents, built the fire, cooked everything, and did pretty much everything.  The first night, I tossed around a little on top of a very flat air mattress, so we went and got a new one; the second night, I slept like a damn baby.  I spent a long time outside.  It really does feel different to be outside ALL the time.  I think I liked it, though I won't be packing up my Scion to go Texas camping anytime soon.

Happy goose on Vineyard Lake.

After that, Tom dropped me off for a few days' stay at my friend Forbes's house near Philly.  I took lots of pictures and caught up on sleep; I ate incredible brisket and potato salad and macaroni and cheese and shoo fly pie.  Forbes put me on a plane to Detroit, where I met my parents and spent a few days at the lake cottage they get every summer.  We watched the Tigers every night; I read a ton and worked on the quilt that I haven't had time even to look at in the past six months.  I helped them move back to the house at the end of the week, and we went to a Toledo Mud Hens game.  I'm a minor league baseball fan, and the Mud Hens are my favorite.

Hummingbird at Mom + Dad's.

I intentionally scheduled a seven-hour layover in Atlanta.  I have a friend who's had a lot of changes to go through in the last six months, like me, and somewhere in there, our friendship lost focus.  We haven't talked at all since I left Georgia.  I bought gifts for him and his pets while I was traveling, I let him know when I would be there, I flew to Atlanta and hiked to the airport's atrium, and I waited.  He didn't come.  It sucks, but I've done everything I can do.

When I'm flying, someone always asks if I'm "coming or going"--leaving home or on the way home.  On that flight from Michigan to Georgia, I didn't know what to say.  I'm flying to "home," but then I'm getting on a plane to fly to where I live.  I was gone from Texas longer than I've lived in Texas.  Confusing.

So now I live in Texas.

Vermont

That's the view from my window at the farmhouse where I'm staying till Friday.  I took the picture around 6 am.  Below is a photo of the same view around 10 am.

Vermont is the greenest place I've ever seen.  Especially after two weeks in south central Texas.  Yesterday we walked all around the town of Middlebury, VT, checking out the shops and the college and various other interesting things to look at.  Today, I think we're going  to Ft. Ticonderoga, across Lake Champlain in New York.

The night I arrived, we had a late dinner at a little pub in Middlebury.  They served mac-and-cheese as an entree.  You know what I ate for dinner?  Mac-and-cheese.

I don't have time for a long entry; just waiting on my friend Tom to finish a phone call and then we'll be out of here.  I figured I had time to post a couple of photos.

Saturday

Turkey avocado BLT at Blue Star.

John skipped yoga today and we went to the Blue Star Art Complex in San Antonio.  We had lunch at the Blue Star Brewing Co. and poked around some of the art galleries.  It's oppressively hot outside, but for some reason it's more tolerable than Georgia heat.  The difference between sun and shade in Texas is actually a difference, not just a brightness.  In the sun, you feel like you're going to die on the spot; in the shade, you kinda feel like it's not so bad.  In Georgia, you want to die both ways.  Texas = heat lamp, Georgia = steam table.  I took some pictures (but not inside the galleries) and we came back to the house.


This morning, we tried showering at the same time.  Not in the same place, for chrissake--why would I write about that here?  We have two showers, but we share a large hot water heater with several other apartments, so I wondered if having both showers going would affect water pressure at all.  It didn't.  I didn't even notice that John got in his shower while I was in mine.  Kinda cool.

I'm thinking I will try not to post ALL the same photos here that I post on Facebook.  I know pretty much everyone who reads this is also on Facebook, so it seems silly to post all the same pictures.  I don't know, maybe it's not silly.  I definitely don't post as many here as I do there.  I'll decide after the New England trip, in any case.

Speaking of which, I'll be leaving bright and early tomorrow to fly to Vermont, with a layover in DC.  I'm there till Friday, when I'll be in Massachusetts for three days, leaving Sunday to drive to Philly, staying there till Wed. the 6th, then flying to Detroit to hang with my parents for a few days, then flying home to TX on the 11th with a long layover in Atlanta.  When I get back in two weeks, Fleck will be even less amused than he is in this photo: