well.

[kip_w]

.
So many things I missed putting down here. One day I left for work and it was drizzling a bit, and all these skinny red worms were crawling up onto the porch. I tried to pick one up to put it off, and it commenced flipping about frantically. "Okay, stupid, die up here then," I told it. And all of them. That evening, I saw that they had, indeed, followed my suggestion.

The next day, it was snowing. The weather's yo-yoing up here, just like my work-related emotions. A relatively good day is followed by another day of quicksand jobs that suck me down, down, down. Confidence gives way to dull dread. Armies run from left to right, then from right to left. Sarah runs to hug me when I come home. Time vanishes into some form of plumbing fixture.



Progress occurs. I write down stuff I've learned in a steno pad (thanks to galacticvoyeur for the tip!). I called the rest home I played at and found that I have been given a good report and might get some gigs next budget year. I asked my boss if he was thinking of hiring me, and he said as far as he's concerned, I'm hired. Today I got a key to the place. I hope they aren't wanting me to work this weekend, as we have family in for the weekend.

Guys have been up on the roof all week at work, raking the asphalt. One day, we had other guys in the ceilings, crawling around putting cables through and cursing the concrete bulkheads they had to drill through. I heard a crash, and turned to see one of them sitting on the floor next to his ladder, looking a bit dazed. "Are you okay?" "I'm not sure." But he seemed to be all right.

I seem to be all right too. Yesterday was a good day. Today wasn't so bad, except for the two to four slot, when I was wrestling with an intractable business card. Just as I declared victory and printed one side, remarks were made about the color balance and I had to go back to the tedious round of making a correction and seeing on paper if it worked. And being chided for spending too much time on low-priority jobs at that. When I left at 5:30, I was just a little disappointed that the front door wasn't locked.

I've been talking to my sister about my folks. Dad is finally ready to find a rest home for Mom, which is an unimaginably huge step for him to take, but he's getting old too, and would like to sleep at night and have a life. Mom's not well, and hasn't been for years, unfortunately. Dad wants to move from Texas to Michigan, close to my oldest sister, and find a place for Mom nearby. They'll be about a million miles closer to me when that happens.

My sister was down helping to sort and de-junk the house, and take the first steps in dispatching "keep" material to us four kids. Being a violinist, she will get the horn violin. This is entirely proper, and her good hubby will make an appropriate display case for it. She's putting Mom's slides aside for me. I plan to start scanning when they arrive. Many more decisions will be made later. I found out last night that the canister of 45s and 7-inch 78s didn't get thrown away in the early 80s, but has been deteriorating in their garage. She's shipping me the remains, which I am keenly anticipating after decades of thinking I'd never see or hear any of them again. (I'd even tried looking for some of them online.)

This is the first night I've been up this late in a while. Time to stop writing. I haven't had time to read LJ -and- sleep, so I've been opting for sleep. I'll have little time to do this with the family about, too, so today I gave a long (and necessarily shallow) read, catching up before writing this. I'm hoping that things will get sort of normal before too long. Meaning, I'll have time to do things, and I'll stop having the sort of work-related dreams I usually only have when I'm running a fever. I wake up several times a night and tell myself I don't have to remember the details of some "job," because it's just a figment of my stupid imagination.

Anyway, thanks for reading beyond the cut line. I go sleep now.
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Comments

[ckd]

Sleep is a good thing. I hope the dreams get sorted out fairly soon.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't have them every time now. And perhaps they are less urgent now.

[meggins.livejournal.com]

I have stupid work dreams a lot, so I can sympathize. Hope yours go away.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

They haven't yet, but they yield the stage to other dreams on occasion.

The worst work dreams are when I'm sick. They used to be a tip-off that I was sick. When I worked for the answering service, a work/sick dream was that I was some sort of disembodied cell in a system and I was supposed to mentally direct -this- sort of thing in one direction, and -that- sort of thing in another one. And each time I woke up, I went back to it when I fell asleep again. When I worked at the Water Pik (shower massage) assembly line, I dreamt I was lying on my back on my cot, which was now a long -- let's all say it together -- assembly line, and people were standing over me with the implication that something was about to be going on. They never actually worked on me. Count my blessings.

[meggins.livejournal.com]

You win. A dubious victory. Your work dreams are a lot worse than mine. Mine usually just involve running around doing nonsense or having the vague sense that I'm not doing what I should be doing. Much like work itself.

[neonnurse.livejournal.com]

Glad to see you pop in with an update! Sounds like things are not too bad with gusts up to really good!

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

They're going well enough that I actually had the energy to do a crawl through the missed days of LJ, and then post on my doings. That seems to me to be a pretty good sign.

[rtred.livejournal.com]

Okay, I was about to ask what they were doing up on your roof when I realized that they were on the roof at work!

One of these days I need to get up there to visit. Hopefully not in red worm season.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Usually, I see normal old worms. I don't know where the skinny little red bastiches came from. When I got home, they were little black ex-worms. Didn't seem to be as many, either -- I'm hoping the birds got some use out of them, anyway. The weird thing was seeing one coming up the steps.

But yeah, you visit. You would be very welcome.

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

Sleep, yes. But thank you for letting us know what's going on in your life. It's good to hear about your family's dealings with old parents. We're all at That Age, I guess.

The last time I really dreamed about work when I had a job looking up information on blue microfiche with white letters. For a couple of weeks every dream had a blue background with white letters, so I felt like I was dreaming in a cheapo-cheapo television studio where somebody'd forgotten to turn off the Chroma-Key, or whatever that thing was called.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Chroma-Key is right. The miracle process of the 70s, or perhaps earlier. We used it to good effect in my TV production class in high school, when we did a cheesy "Star Trek" take-off. When I say "we," I mean I helped come up with the idea and wrote most of the script, but gave up on it when the contributions of others started getting out of hand.

I think weathermen should wear chroma-key blue shirts, so when they stand in front of the blue screen with the imaginary chart, we'll still see most of it. I want to see the weather, not the weatherman.

When I first got so into Tetris that I was wasting several consecutive hours on it at a shot, it did strange things to my perception for some time afterwards. Everything seemed to have a sort of perceptual Tetris overlay. In its way, it was as bad as the carsickness I got from Castle Wolfenstein. In both cases, the game wasn't worth the effects, though I will occasionally go back and play some more Tetris. (I wonder if Welltris and the 3-D version of Tetris are still available.)

An Option for Decaying Vinyl

[akavivian.livejournal.com]

Bud knows a man here in town who, for a price (of course), will clean up the sound and give you a copy on CD of old music on 45 or 78. This is the guy who owned the record store that Bud used to manage.

(To avoid copyright issues, you must provide, or buy from him, a copy of the original vinyl version of the song.)

I don't know what inventory he has now, but he used to have something on the order of a million 45s and a large number of 78s, so you might be able to do something with him. Even if your copies are unplayable, he might be willing to make you a CD based on his better copy as long as you prove that you have a license to own the music.

Mary

Re: An Option for Decaying Vinyl

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

These aren't regular 78s, but plastic kiddie records. Many black, some red, some blue or green. Apparently some are delaminating from years in the garage. Those are probably the cardboard-center picture disks, like "Sourwood Mountain" and "The Little Mountain Climber," which I can still recall. It's about a cute widdle goat. We'll just see what they look like when they arrive.

It'll be exciting to see what comes in intact kind of condition. I'm looking forward to Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Cry of the Wild Goose," (a 45 which we used to enjoy playing at 78) backed with "Shotgun Boogie." The real jewel of the collection is The Streamliners with Joanie doing "Pachalafaka" and "Frankfurter Sandwiches," which I'm glad to say I abstracted from the bunch years ago, and which has traveled safely with me through years of moves.

I still need a better 78 turntable. Maybe now that I'm a wealthy proletarian, I can return to that issue. The problem there is that a turntable new enough to have compatible electronics would only have the 78 needle on as an afterthought, and a recent turntable with a proper 78 needle knows in its heart that it's supposed to be an expensive instrument for a connoisseur. I'm just a slob with a bunch of platters.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

It's been a week since you posted, so I hope things are better! I missed you guys at Minicon.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Already a week? And I was feeling so "caught up." Well, I guess I am caught up in my work, anyway. I come home, have a little time to race through rasff, lj, and some blogs, then it's time to get Sarah to bed. This means brushing teeth with Sarah at 8, then lying on her floor until she's asleep and I wake up, which can be anywhere up to about ten. Then I'm tired and I stumble around comically for a short while before veering off toward Slumberland. Once I'm in bed, I even fall asleep sometimes.

And an apa I was in for about 20 years (before running out of time due to being Sarah's dad) is doing a big anniversary issue. If I can just knock out a page and email it by Monday, I'll get the issue. The suspense is killing me.