Monsoonery?

It stormed here tonight briefly, for about an hour or so. That's it. The Weather Channel was predicting us to get 1-2 inches of rain. We got maybe two-tenths of an inch here. It was enough to wet the pavement and grass, and now (at nearly 5AM) has mostly dried up. This made me want to cry out to the heavens for more rain, harder rain, and winds which would actually blow through the house and cool it down in here more.

Instead, nothing. It's supposed to clear up as the morning hours progress, and get up to 85 today. The chances for rain and storms previously in the forecast throughout the rest of the week have now vanished, and after Wednesday it's supposed to be in the 90s every day again for the foreseeable future.

I don't know what I expected, really. This is Kansas in the summer, where it never rains and it's so hot on a daily basis that you may broil in your own home, in your own skin. Immediately after it stopped raining, the temperature began to noticeably creep up again inside the house.

However, on my spider patrols tonight, I found, saw, and killed nothing. I don't know if it was the rain or the fact that yesterday wasn't incredibly hot, but I did put out five new traps before I went to bed this morning -- two in the garage, two downstairs, and one in the upstairs. That was the last of the traps I had; I ordered two more sets of them on Amazon tonight in the overnight hours since I've been awake. If I need to put thirty spider traps in this house to catch them all and make them go away, then I will do so.

Daisy is coming down tomorrow instead of Wednesday; she is getting off work in the morning and going to look at the places she wants to book for the wedding, and will either drive down shortly thereafter or will nap before coming down, but she's coming tomorrow. This means that today and tomorrow before she gets here are, effectively, my "chore days." I need to vacuum the house and put away my laundry, and if the grass is dry enough, I need to mow it and do the outside trimming. That will probably also require me to put gas in the mower and in the car while I'm out and about. Before I go to bed for the day I will at least do the vacuuming, and I have already put cleaner in the toilet so I can scrub it down as well.

Doing more job searches tonight has been fruitless; nothing in the way of teaching positions have been updated with anything new since Thursday or Friday, and I've already applied for all of those that I could. The non-teaching side looks even more grim, with companies looking for managers and sales consultants and holders of MBAs or PhDs. It's rather frustrating. I have a lot of applications out right now, yes, but that doesn't mean anyone's going to contact me.

On the plus side, I have paid all the bills that have come in with relative ease and no worries. I'll have to write out the rent check next week, but other than that I've already taken care of everything for the month, as well as my car insurance (which I wrote about yesterday morning). In addition to that, I mailed my parents the checks I had from graduation gifts, which my mother will deposit into my bank account once she gets them later this week.

I was able to call home yesterday morning and talk to my parents for a while, especially my dad (for Father's Day and all) and discuss stuff with them about the wedding as well. My parents want to do a separate reception back home, at the house, after everything has wound down a bit -- so that those family and friends who are unable to come to Omaha for the wedding can have a celebration for us. I said that was fine; I rather expected that, actually. Very, very few of my family and friends, aside from my parents, will be able to attend the wedding, and many of those friends and extended family who will be invited to this separate reception haven't seen me since I moved out here to the midwest...in 2006. Some have, of course, but most of my friends back home who are still around the area? Only a handful have been able to visit with me on my trips back home. I tend to keep a low profile when I fly home to visit anyhow, as there's never enough time to see everyone who would want to see me, and I don't want anyone to feel spurned.

"What about this summer?" I asked my mother on the phone. "I'll be in Omaha with [Daisy] for the 4th and a few days after, probably, but as you know, my schedule is pretty wide open right now, and [Daisy] only needs to get some advance notice to her bosses to be able to come out."

It would be a fairly short trip out there anyhow; while Daisy does get three days a week off, the most she would be able to take at any given time would be about three more, I'm guessing. And, of course, that has to take into account flight and travel time there and back home, too. I again reminded my mother that even if Daisy couldn't make it out there because of job restraints, I still want to come out at some point this summer. As much as I'd love Daisy to make that trip with me, neither she nor I know as of yet if it will be completely possible. I do know, however, that it's possible for me.

Mind you, it's pretty odd of me to want to visit home as much as I do right now. Or, at the very least, it's somewhat uncharacteristic of me. I say this because every other trip I've made home over the past several years has been, really, a hassle on some level because of school and/or work. I haven't been home in the summer since 2010, which was the last time I visited over the summer months. Since then I've only made two other trips out there, last year. Each time it was scheduling around my schooling and work, and there was a set number of days I could be gone before I had to be back home or face catastrophic grad-school-related consequences. I've turned down offers for visits in the past due to budget or time constraints, as well. My parents wanted to fly me out there for Christmas 2011, for example, and as I was broke and living alone for the first time ever, I wasn't able to do it. Now, however, until I find a job someplace I could conceivably visit anytime, and stay for a day or two longer than I normally do -- as long as the cats have enough food, water, and litter, they're fine -- and have proven that fact to me countless times in the past. I may be on a fixed budget for a while, but I'm not "poor," per se.

Daisy can't just disappear to West Virginia for a week with no ramifications, however, because of her job -- and she can't really help that, as it's sort of vital to her finances (and to our wedding planning/finances) that she stay employed. Obviously. I've made sure she understands that she doesn't need to try to move heaven and earth to be able to come visit my parents with me this summer if she can't do it, or can't get more than a couple of extra days off.

As always, though, there are multiple factors at play if I or we get to visit -- if I get hired for a teaching position somewhere, it basically means there's no way I'll be able to make a trip home. All of the teaching positions I've applied for have been in faraway states, and if I'm hired in one of those places, it means that the rest of the summer I will be cleaning, packing up the rest of this house, and using every bit of money I have left to move out of here and move to one of these places, with Daisy in tow soon thereafter or at the same time. The only saving grace is that some of the places I've applied to are within a few hours of driving from my parents' place, and one or two of them are very close.

And, of course, I'd have to figure out a way to get the Monte Carlo to wherever I'd end up, as well. Because, believe me, she's not gonna make a cross-country drive unless I gave her a full mechanical overhaul first, as much as I love her.

Also, if I can't find anything and end up adjuncting here this fall, well, I wouldn't be able to travel past August 15th or so anyhow. So, it's possible that there's a fairly short window of sorts for this trip, and (ironically) the only time I would be able to make it without any real time (or money) constraints would be, well, if I were to remain unemployed. Which is again, so incredibly ironic that I'm drowning in its irony.

Like I said, I'm fine for money right now, but ask me again in three more months, especially if I am still unemployed at that time.

Yet another reason I am itching to organize a yard sale here at my home sometime this summer -- let's get rid of all this stuff I don't need and start making money on it.

As day breaks, it has clouded up again outside and looks like it could continue raining, though everything on the radar is north and east of me. I'm waiting until later this morning to do the vacuuming, as I'd not only like to be able to see what I'm doing, but I need to get a shower before I go to bed for the day anyhow, and there's no reason to shower and then get all sweaty again from working around the house.

I was wearing one of my tie-dye tank-tops last night until, after three or so years of wear, it basically fell apart on me; I was adjusting it after using the bathroom and the stitching ripped. I had to end up throwing it away. Oh well. At least I now know the general life-cycle of a tank. At least a dyed one, anyway.

By the way, I said I would take pictures of the shirt that I kept after making shirts for Daisy's dad for Father's Day. Here it is:

I'm getting better with the spiral technique, though the "wine" colored dye I used in this shirt is the kind that will run and fade if it's not soda-ashed first -- which is why I kept this one. You can see the pinkish-purple hue in the fabric; that will slowly wash out over repeated washings, and will eventually fade back to almost white while the darker streaks of it will slowly fade as well. It's pretty, but after several washes it'll not look as good as it does now, which is a big part of why this is the one I kept. I found a bottle of red dye I had stored away and didn't know about, so I might re-dye this at some point in the future with that, and see how it looks then. I made sure I got the shirts in 2X; Daisy's dad doesn't need a 2X, but 100% cotton shirts will shrink slowly over the years with repeated washings and dryings -- I don't care if it says "pre-shrunk" or not. They still do.

On that note, there's not much else to report -- Daisy will be getting home from work soon, and I plan to talk to her for a bit before I finish my cleaning for the day and go to bed.