Spring semester: day fifty
On the good side, I delight in saying "day fifty" because it means we're in the home stretch; the semester is 2/3 over. On the bad side, the semester is 2/3 over, and I have no clue as of yet what the future holds for me after that.
It is once more 75 degrees and gorgeous this afternoon, and again I am sitting here fighting off my allergies. It's been really windy -- such as, some days having 50-60mph gusts -- since last week, and warm, really nice weather + wind = pollen and allergens everywhere, pollen and allergens that clog up my nose, throat, lungs, etc. Last night I had a terrible sinus headache in my forehead and face, and had to take two different kinds of medication to get it to go away (sinus/pain pills and a double-dose of Mucinex).
Of course, because I have to go teach as per the usual this week, this gorgeous weather is short-lived. Of course it is. They changed the forecast last night; the highs for the rest of the week are barely supposed to reach 60, and it's supposed to rain for a good chunk of the week. I mean, this is fine; it's better than highs of 20s and 30s...it's just not the 75 it's been for the past few days.
I mentioned earlier that my classes this week are basically on autopilot, and that's because they are. The classes themselves, anyway. Collecting papers tomorrow morning, grading what I can of them in the afternoon (read: hopefully all of them) and doing conferences with my students tomorrow night. Wednesday consists of collecting a set of drafts from my 210 students and talking to them more about their grants. Thursday consists of me covering Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" out of the workbook in my 102 class, and (if they're done being graded) giving their papers back to them. And then my weekend starts again. I'll be busy doing my grading and the like, but the classes themselves are pretty much already taken care of.
I have to get gas in the morning before I leave town and drive south to go teach, but right now that's the least of my overall worries -- last night I went to Walmart (where yes, there was stock in the aisles, but apparently nobody was stocking it -- the aisles were basically deserted of all workers), and when I fired up the Monte Carlo, it...I don't know exactly how to put this...jumped for a second, shuddered, and stalled briefly when I was starting it. I tried again and she started up fine, drove normally, acted normally with no (new) problem indicator lights on the dash or any other problems, etc. She was fine when I came back home with the groceries as well. I couldn't tell you what it was aside from a normal case of "my car acts weird sometimes." Mind you, she has new oil and coolant, and I put one of the expensive Gumout engine/fuel system/fuel-injector cleaners into her last week when I filled up, so I don't know. Again, it's not like it's been cold or anything like that, and it's not like the car sat for a long amount of time without being driven anywhere -- it was three days. Just odd, that's all.
As you folks know, my car -- while I love her dearly -- is falling apart. It's not going to last forever, and I don't expect it to. You folks also know that I'm generally of the mindset that if it runs and drives and gets me to school and back for my job without dying on me, I don't have the time or money to be incredibly concerned with it about 90% of the time. I just don't, and I can't do anything about that until I get a better job and get more money to either fix it up really well (probably about $2k, roughly, to fix all of the stuff that needs to be fixed) or just buy a newer car. I can't do that when I'm making about $1000 per month. Total. If the Monte Carlo lasts me until after the wedding, when I'll be able to get a different, better job (hopefully), then I will have put about 25k miles on her over the course of three years, and it will have been a good, respectable run for my road tank.
Of course, I expected to have a better job a year ago, too, and a year ago I was crossing my fingers even then every day when I made the trips to/from campus, saying things like "if you just last until graduation, if you just last until graduation..."
Anyway. It would just be my luck if a major part on the car blew right now, as I'm trying to save all the money I can for living expenses after the wedding, my high-limit Discover card is half full, my pay has been reduced by about $200 a month because of health insurance, and my tax returns haven't come in yet.
As an aside, I expect at least one of the returns to come in over the course of the next week or two, if not both of them.
Last night I applied for more jobs in the Omaha area -- another at a college in the city, and an English Instructor position in a college right outside the city. The latter was not an easy application to do; unlike other institutions of higher learning who leaped into the 21st century many years ago, this school has not -- their application is paper-and-snail-mail only.
Yeah, I know.
So I printed out their general application form, wrote and printed out a cover letter with my salary requirements (which they requested), printed a copy of my CV, professional references, and teaching philosophy statement, and included an official transcript from the university (I was able to get five of them for free when I picked up my diploma last year), tucked them all into a manila envelope, gauged the weight on my hand and decided to use three stamps, and stuck it in the mail this morning. I told Daisy that this probably makes my chances a little better -- most people will see that they're only doing snail-mail applications and will pass on applying for the job. Not me; I'm desperate, and if possible I'd like to keep teaching...as long as I can make a live-able wage from it, of course. The college in question is about 20 miles or so to the west of the city of Omaha proper, so if I get the job I'd better be making a live-able wage just to pay for the gas alone.
I also told Daisy that regardless of how much I want to keep teaching, it's not like I'm going to pick a $10k a semester job over a $30-40k a year job just because I'd rather teach. I'm not an idiot, obviously. And we have to survive.
One of the jobs I applied for over the weekend was the same job she does, at her company, and possibly even on her same shift.
"Do you think we could work together?" she asked me. It wasn't a question of wanting, it was a question of feasibility and workplace compatibility.
"Honey, I don't care," I said. "If we're both working the same job, whether it be the same shift or different shifts, we'd be making close to $60k a year combined. That's new(er) car money for me. That's money to pay all of our bills and get groceries without any problems. That's money to help pay off our credit cards and student loans. That's money that will help us pay for children, because I'm guessing you'll be with child by Christmas this year."
Boom. Pregnant.
Ahem.
I don't really care about workplace BS or drama -- I'm the kind of guy who operates on the outskirts of all social interaction anyhow. I care about the paycheck and what that paycheck could/would do for our standard of living.
Of course, I applied for other positions in said company as well -- four different ones in total. And that's just for her company, and just what I've applied for there right now. In the past week or so, I've applied for ten different jobs (that I remember, anyway). I have a decent shot at any one of them, to be honest with you. I don't apply for things that I have no experience in or knowledge of -- I'd rather not waste my time or the time of anyone else reviewing applications, and I'd actually like to get a callback or an email asking me "hey, you sound awesome, would you like to interview with us?" Etc. Obviously, these aren't the only jobs I'll apply for; I'll be applying for many others over the course of the next month or so. I don't want to slack off on this, and I want to be able to secure something for the foreseeable future after the wedding so that I can, y'know, help pay the bills and survive.
And possibly get a newer car.
Since it's going to be considerably chillier this week than I previously expected, I don't even know what I'm going to wear to teach in. Again, most of my colder-weather clothing has been put away and/or otherwise boxed up for the spring and the move. I left out some pants and a few jackets, but it's slim pickings for a lot of it because, ahem, it's supposed to stay in the 70s once it gets there at this time of the year. I mean, for fuck's sake, tomorrow is April. The past few years has been terrible when it comes to flip-flopping temperatures in the spring. In the fall, yes, it'll be in the 80s and 90s one week and then in the 30s and 40s the next, but at least it stays there and we know what to expect.
On that note, I'm going to cook something to eat (since I can, well, do that now after my trip to Walmart last night) and see if Daisy's around when I get back to the computer so that I can take my normal Monday night sleeping pills and go to bed.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Small Scales, Part II
Much like yesterday, it is once more a gorgeous afternoon and I am once more sitting here in front of my computer fighting off allergy attacks. The difference today is that I've gotten a lot of things accomplished in the past 24 hours.
After finishing my post yesterday, I unloaded the dishwasher, loaded it again and ran it, ran four loads of laundry (including the blankets/sheets for the bed), switched out my wardrobes from winter to spring/summer, packed two incredibly full steel sacs of charity clothing, vacuumed the entire downstairs, gathered all of the household trash and recycling and took it out to the cans (I'll take those down to the curb this evening), cleaned out the closet in my man cave and packed/boxed up a ton of the shirts that I won't get to wear between now and the move, finding more to donate to charity, washed and scrubbed my coffee pot and air purifier, fed the cats, cooked and ate dinner while watching two episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, checked and responded to student emails, shredded old and/or no longer important documents and old school papers, dumped the shredder, and -- finally -- applied for five new jobs in Omaha.
I'd say that was a pretty productive day. Not bad for a guy whose weekend attire is a Batman t-shirt, Angry Birds pajama pants, and slippers, right?
When I went to bed (around 4AM) I slept for eleven and a half hours. Straight through. I think I got up once to pee (I remember it vaguely), but that's it.
I'm still tired. You know that sort of tired you get when you have not only been constantly busy, but when you finally get to bed, you sleep for a really really long time and then get up? It's that sort of tired. I've been pushing myself pretty hard this weekend; since Thursday night I've been working on all sorts of different things and busting my ass on those things through most of my waking hours each day. Today I need a bit of a break -- aside from applying for more jobs tonight, and making a trip to Walmart in the overnight hours, I'm not planning to do a whole lot. I'll have to do the Walmart trip whether I want to or not -- the cats are out of litter and I desperately need food in the house aside from sandwich stuff, ramen, coffee, and almond milk. That's most of what I have now, by the way. Oh, and I have some waffles in the freezer that I made a few weeks ago. I want some vegetables, some soups, some things to cook, etc. I don't have any of those things right now. I've been trying to shop thriftily, but with that sort of mindset, after a while you still work your way down to nothing. I'll also see if I can get some boxes from Walmart while I'm there tonight as well, as the overnight hours is when they stock shelves.
Four of the jobs I applied for last night were within Daisy's company -- the application process for them wasn't that bad, honestly. The fifth was at the university Daisy graduated from several years ago, and its application process was all flash-based -- making it ungodly stupid and long, as it pulls information from a resume you upload first to fill in boxes. Well, depending on how your resume is formatted, you'll spend more time deleting sections and boxes than you will actually adding/correcting pertinent information. I've applied for many jobs that do this sort of resume processing, and it's a huge pain in the ass. It's even worse if it's for a teaching position somewhere (this one wasn't), because it pulls info from your CV, which is much longer and more detailed than a resume. There's at least one more I wanted to apply for last night, but the site for it was down for maintenance when I tried.
Daisy, in the meantime, has been spending her spare time looking up more apartments to go check out. She found a few more last night within our price range -- with at least one of them only a little more than I pay now for rent on this house -- but she's discouraged by the reviews former tenants have left (such as how thin the walls/floors are, etc). I told her, again, I don't care where we end up as long as we can afford it and fit into it, and they take the cats. I have few requirements and even fewer dealbreakers. We need someplace with a washer/dryer hookup (because I own my machines and will be taking them with me), preferably with a dishwasher and preferably not on the third or fourth floor of a building, as that would not only be a huge pain in the ass to move into (keep in mind that I not only have a lot of furniture, but a king-size bed and frame) but would suck for grocery shopping when we have 50 pounds' worth of bags, and parking that's not on the street. That's really it. She's still doing her searching, and plans to go look at some places, at least, with her parents and/or best friend once she's off work this week.
My electric bill came in the mail this weekend, as expected -- it's only $150 this month. That's still high (because yes, I did have to run the furnace a fair amount this past month), but it's not the $212 I paid last time around. I'll pay it and send it out this week. By the way the weather looks, I may not have to run the furnace at all for the foreseeable future -- it's 75 right now, and the temperatures this week are supposed to be hovering around that for highs (within 10 degrees or so) most every day. There's only one day in the forecast -- next weekend -- that the temperature may dip down to around the freezing point again at night. Apparently, finally, we are getting our spring. This is good, seeing as I only left about three pairs of pants out at the ready, and have very few long-sleeve shirts left ready to go for colder weather after I did my wardrobe switch/packing (I'll always leave out a few hoodies for cooler or rainy days). It's still supposed to be around 60 tonight when I go out and do my shopping, and I plan to wear shorts then.
I have to enjoy my free time when I have it, as well -- staring down the barrel of the gun that is the next three months or so, free time will be at a premium. While yes, I have done a ton of work this weekend and want to do little more than sleep right now, I know I can't (obviously). There's always going to be something else that needs to be done, and in the interim I have to give myself a little breathing space to live and be sloth-like when I need it. Tonight I'll talk to Daisy when she gets up before work, I'll probably (finally) play a video game to unwind a bit, and then I'll get back to the grind applying for more jobs and doing more housework before bed. Tomorrow (Monday) I'm off, of course, but I won't have a lot of time to do much of importance, as I'll have to go to bed early in order to be awake all day/evening/night Tuesday until I get home from my 7PM 011 class. On the plus side, if I'm bored that afternoon, I can always grade through the stack of papers I'll receive from my 102 students that morning -- their second big papers come in that day, and we begin covering their long final assignments in the course.
So that's what's going on right now. Nothing of major importance, really. Just trying to take care of what I can and what I have.
After finishing my post yesterday, I unloaded the dishwasher, loaded it again and ran it, ran four loads of laundry (including the blankets/sheets for the bed), switched out my wardrobes from winter to spring/summer, packed two incredibly full steel sacs of charity clothing, vacuumed the entire downstairs, gathered all of the household trash and recycling and took it out to the cans (I'll take those down to the curb this evening), cleaned out the closet in my man cave and packed/boxed up a ton of the shirts that I won't get to wear between now and the move, finding more to donate to charity, washed and scrubbed my coffee pot and air purifier, fed the cats, cooked and ate dinner while watching two episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, checked and responded to student emails, shredded old and/or no longer important documents and old school papers, dumped the shredder, and -- finally -- applied for five new jobs in Omaha.
I'd say that was a pretty productive day. Not bad for a guy whose weekend attire is a Batman t-shirt, Angry Birds pajama pants, and slippers, right?
When I went to bed (around 4AM) I slept for eleven and a half hours. Straight through. I think I got up once to pee (I remember it vaguely), but that's it.
I'm still tired. You know that sort of tired you get when you have not only been constantly busy, but when you finally get to bed, you sleep for a really really long time and then get up? It's that sort of tired. I've been pushing myself pretty hard this weekend; since Thursday night I've been working on all sorts of different things and busting my ass on those things through most of my waking hours each day. Today I need a bit of a break -- aside from applying for more jobs tonight, and making a trip to Walmart in the overnight hours, I'm not planning to do a whole lot. I'll have to do the Walmart trip whether I want to or not -- the cats are out of litter and I desperately need food in the house aside from sandwich stuff, ramen, coffee, and almond milk. That's most of what I have now, by the way. Oh, and I have some waffles in the freezer that I made a few weeks ago. I want some vegetables, some soups, some things to cook, etc. I don't have any of those things right now. I've been trying to shop thriftily, but with that sort of mindset, after a while you still work your way down to nothing. I'll also see if I can get some boxes from Walmart while I'm there tonight as well, as the overnight hours is when they stock shelves.
Four of the jobs I applied for last night were within Daisy's company -- the application process for them wasn't that bad, honestly. The fifth was at the university Daisy graduated from several years ago, and its application process was all flash-based -- making it ungodly stupid and long, as it pulls information from a resume you upload first to fill in boxes. Well, depending on how your resume is formatted, you'll spend more time deleting sections and boxes than you will actually adding/correcting pertinent information. I've applied for many jobs that do this sort of resume processing, and it's a huge pain in the ass. It's even worse if it's for a teaching position somewhere (this one wasn't), because it pulls info from your CV, which is much longer and more detailed than a resume. There's at least one more I wanted to apply for last night, but the site for it was down for maintenance when I tried.
Daisy, in the meantime, has been spending her spare time looking up more apartments to go check out. She found a few more last night within our price range -- with at least one of them only a little more than I pay now for rent on this house -- but she's discouraged by the reviews former tenants have left (such as how thin the walls/floors are, etc). I told her, again, I don't care where we end up as long as we can afford it and fit into it, and they take the cats. I have few requirements and even fewer dealbreakers. We need someplace with a washer/dryer hookup (because I own my machines and will be taking them with me), preferably with a dishwasher and preferably not on the third or fourth floor of a building, as that would not only be a huge pain in the ass to move into (keep in mind that I not only have a lot of furniture, but a king-size bed and frame) but would suck for grocery shopping when we have 50 pounds' worth of bags, and parking that's not on the street. That's really it. She's still doing her searching, and plans to go look at some places, at least, with her parents and/or best friend once she's off work this week.
My electric bill came in the mail this weekend, as expected -- it's only $150 this month. That's still high (because yes, I did have to run the furnace a fair amount this past month), but it's not the $212 I paid last time around. I'll pay it and send it out this week. By the way the weather looks, I may not have to run the furnace at all for the foreseeable future -- it's 75 right now, and the temperatures this week are supposed to be hovering around that for highs (within 10 degrees or so) most every day. There's only one day in the forecast -- next weekend -- that the temperature may dip down to around the freezing point again at night. Apparently, finally, we are getting our spring. This is good, seeing as I only left about three pairs of pants out at the ready, and have very few long-sleeve shirts left ready to go for colder weather after I did my wardrobe switch/packing (I'll always leave out a few hoodies for cooler or rainy days). It's still supposed to be around 60 tonight when I go out and do my shopping, and I plan to wear shorts then.
I have to enjoy my free time when I have it, as well -- staring down the barrel of the gun that is the next three months or so, free time will be at a premium. While yes, I have done a ton of work this weekend and want to do little more than sleep right now, I know I can't (obviously). There's always going to be something else that needs to be done, and in the interim I have to give myself a little breathing space to live and be sloth-like when I need it. Tonight I'll talk to Daisy when she gets up before work, I'll probably (finally) play a video game to unwind a bit, and then I'll get back to the grind applying for more jobs and doing more housework before bed. Tomorrow (Monday) I'm off, of course, but I won't have a lot of time to do much of importance, as I'll have to go to bed early in order to be awake all day/evening/night Tuesday until I get home from my 7PM 011 class. On the plus side, if I'm bored that afternoon, I can always grade through the stack of papers I'll receive from my 102 students that morning -- their second big papers come in that day, and we begin covering their long final assignments in the course.
So that's what's going on right now. Nothing of major importance, really. Just trying to take care of what I can and what I have.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Small Scales
It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon and I'm sitting here in my bathrobe fighting off allergy attacks -- as when it's warm and pretty, until I get used to it, my allergies go nuts. I've taken Mucinex as of right now to see if that helps, but if it doesn't I'll move on to the generic Zyrtec I take when they get really bad. I can't help it, really, other than staying medicated when I need to be.
While I don't have a lot of school-related work to do this weekend (in fact, I have little to none) I do have a lot of around-the-house work to do. I also probably need to go shopping tonight in the overnight hours if I'm still awake -- I have some necessities I need to pick up for myself and the cats. Yesterday consisted mostly of laundry, cleaning, and packing up some non-essentials. I was able to find some boxes I'd put in storage, about five or six, that will be useful for boxing up some more stuff around the house. I also cleaned out the bottom of my closet in my Man Cave, which involved going through a lot of my "around the house clothes" to decide what I'm donating to charity and what I'm not. The first charity bag (a big, Hefty Steel-Sac bag) is about halfway full right now, and I haven't even switched out my wardrobes yet -- where the real "paring down" of my clothing will begin. I'd like to get about 90% of the clothing I have put away in three or four boxes, and the rest donated to charity. It is, obviously, going to require me to get rid of a lot of stuff I love, but no longer wear that often or have any use for. I'd donate my massive grey trenchcoat to charity, for example -- even though it cost about $130 fifteen years ago -- but Daisy loves it and wants to wear it. I have a few other jackets and the like that will be donated, a lot of my old pants, a ton of older shirts, etc.
I don't know what to do with my massive, beloved leather motorcycle jacket. It weighs eight pounds and I can only wear it when it's really cold outside, but I don't think I've worn it more than ten times in the past five years, and Daisy's vegan -- which means she doesn't approve of leather anyway. I don't know anyone who's my size who would actually take it and wear it, though, and if anyone were to look for the same jacket in a leather biker shop, it would be like $400 (I bought it on Amazon in 2010 or so for about $60, getting a fantastic fucking deal on it). As little as I wear it, I'm not sure I could give it to charity without serious regrets a year or two from now. I'm going to have a lot of regrets like that when I gut this place, I gather.
Oh well, though -- starting a new life and all that.
I did find several boxes that would work well for yard sale boxes on May 3, if I plan to do the city-wide garage sale thing -- which, given what I have and what I need to get rid of, I probably should and will. I have a little over a month to prepare for that, so that's good, right? If nothing else, people will probably pay a good amount of money for the DVDs I'd like to get rid of, and some of the excess furniture and bigger/bulkier items I never use (like the barbecue grill) I'll mark as "free" so that people just take them and haul them away. Some of the stuff I really don't want, I want to mark as "I'll pay you $5 to take this thing away," but I probably won't.
My afternoon and evening will be spent doing things around the house on a small scale, one by one, taking care of tasks. The first will be the wardrobe switch, then vacuuming, then packing another box or three if possible, then spending many hours applying for jobs. This is a good plan. I like this plan. I can only really do one thing at a time, after all, and metering out time for each task, making a list, putting it in order for what I need to do helps calm my nerves and soothes me much more than just talking about it over and over.
While I don't have a lot of school-related work to do this weekend (in fact, I have little to none) I do have a lot of around-the-house work to do. I also probably need to go shopping tonight in the overnight hours if I'm still awake -- I have some necessities I need to pick up for myself and the cats. Yesterday consisted mostly of laundry, cleaning, and packing up some non-essentials. I was able to find some boxes I'd put in storage, about five or six, that will be useful for boxing up some more stuff around the house. I also cleaned out the bottom of my closet in my Man Cave, which involved going through a lot of my "around the house clothes" to decide what I'm donating to charity and what I'm not. The first charity bag (a big, Hefty Steel-Sac bag) is about halfway full right now, and I haven't even switched out my wardrobes yet -- where the real "paring down" of my clothing will begin. I'd like to get about 90% of the clothing I have put away in three or four boxes, and the rest donated to charity. It is, obviously, going to require me to get rid of a lot of stuff I love, but no longer wear that often or have any use for. I'd donate my massive grey trenchcoat to charity, for example -- even though it cost about $130 fifteen years ago -- but Daisy loves it and wants to wear it. I have a few other jackets and the like that will be donated, a lot of my old pants, a ton of older shirts, etc.
I don't know what to do with my massive, beloved leather motorcycle jacket. It weighs eight pounds and I can only wear it when it's really cold outside, but I don't think I've worn it more than ten times in the past five years, and Daisy's vegan -- which means she doesn't approve of leather anyway. I don't know anyone who's my size who would actually take it and wear it, though, and if anyone were to look for the same jacket in a leather biker shop, it would be like $400 (I bought it on Amazon in 2010 or so for about $60, getting a fantastic fucking deal on it). As little as I wear it, I'm not sure I could give it to charity without serious regrets a year or two from now. I'm going to have a lot of regrets like that when I gut this place, I gather.
Oh well, though -- starting a new life and all that.
I did find several boxes that would work well for yard sale boxes on May 3, if I plan to do the city-wide garage sale thing -- which, given what I have and what I need to get rid of, I probably should and will. I have a little over a month to prepare for that, so that's good, right? If nothing else, people will probably pay a good amount of money for the DVDs I'd like to get rid of, and some of the excess furniture and bigger/bulkier items I never use (like the barbecue grill) I'll mark as "free" so that people just take them and haul them away. Some of the stuff I really don't want, I want to mark as "I'll pay you $5 to take this thing away," but I probably won't.
My afternoon and evening will be spent doing things around the house on a small scale, one by one, taking care of tasks. The first will be the wardrobe switch, then vacuuming, then packing another box or three if possible, then spending many hours applying for jobs. This is a good plan. I like this plan. I can only really do one thing at a time, after all, and metering out time for each task, making a list, putting it in order for what I need to do helps calm my nerves and soothes me much more than just talking about it over and over.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Winding it Down
Spring semester: day forty-nine
So, I'm already well in the stages of gettin' shit done that I like to be in around this time of year. Remember, this time last year I was freaking out and panicking because I had my comps in a week, and the results of said comps would dictate whether I was going to be able to, y'know, graduate with my Master's degree.
This time around I don't have that hanging over my head, and I've planned ahead for the end of the semester. I just posted my lesson plans for next week -- yes, at least two or three days before I normally do -- and printed out all of the handouts I need for copies for next week. I don't normally do this stuff until Saturday or Sunday.
This is another one of those quite rare weekends where I don't have anything to do for my students, but that's because I'm collecting and/or workshopping papers in my classes this coming week. My classes themselves will be really easy, as my 011s are simply conferencing with me and doing nothing else, my 102s are turning in their papers and are getting their next assignment, and my 210s are turning in drafts. This next week is basically autopilot for me. Autopilot and grading, really. The rest of this semester won't be this simple or easy, but things are starting to wind down a bit -- even when that winding down, in some cases, is really winding up (with last papers being assigned and the like).
Daisy and I have been making more plans, moving plans -- such as the rental of the moving truck and the timeframe for the move. We are going to be on a fairly tight schedule for that, so we have to make sure everything is...well...plotted on specific days and times. It's going to be about $400 for a moving truck for a three-day rental, which covers mileage but not gas. I'll more than likely have to pay for that myself and put it on my credit card. We also need to be able to plan this stuff well in advance so that if anything happens or changes, we can work around those obstacles. As for apartments, Daisy's also found a place about ten blocks or so from her parents' house (read: in a good, nice part of town) that's somewhat affordable/do-able, and she and her parents are going to go look at it next week. I assume it's in a complex or development and that there are new openings all the time, otherwise she wouldn't put it off. This place, if we get it, would give us a good base of operations for around Omaha for the wedding and afterwards, and is (of course) quite close to her parents' place -- which is a plus for both of us. Of course, none of the moving plans can be put into action until we actually get a place up there, which is going to be expensive enough as it is. As our goal is to be completely moved and completely settled before the wedding, this may be easier said than done.
In my own house here in Kansas, I sent out the rent check today and I got paid today (less because of the health insurance thing, but I still got paid), and currently have no other bills that have come in yet. All of my other bills have already been paid or they will arrive over the course of the next few days/week or so. I did my grocery shopping on Monday, as mentioned before, but will more than likely have to go out to do a little bit more either tomorrow night or Sunday night, as the cats are on the last of their litter now (a jug lasts them about two weeks or so, roughly) and I don't have a ton of food in the house. I have some, but not a lot.
The rest of my weekend? It will be spent diving into the job search. Daisy has referred me for several positions within her current company, positions that I could do and/or wouldn't make me want to come home after work and drink myself to death every night were I to work them. I also have found a few other positions to apply for, including at least three more teaching positions and some other academic positions I've seen in different postings. At this point, I'm very much of the mindset that I should just say fuck it and roll the dice -- I need to find something for the summer that's reliable and can keep us in a house and food. Daisy can't do it all by herself and I wouldn't want or ask her to, so I need to get a job that will help support us and will help pay our bills. After all, I'm an adult, and I'll be damned if I'm not going to be a responsible provider and husband to her.
Call it "spring cleaning" if you will, but cleaning is also going to be a large part of my weekend. Or, at least, "spring uncluttering and rearrangements." While it's barely fifty degrees outside today, that's because it's overcast and a cold front has swept through. For the foreseeable future, the temperature is supposed to be in the mid-60s to mid-and-high 70s. Yesterday afternoon it was 73 here before I took a nap in the late afternoon/evening hours. That means, finally, it's time for me to go through my clothes and switch out my wardrobes -- and in doing so, figure out what needs to be kept and what needs to be donated to charity. I live in a decent sized house now, but wherever Daisy and I end up is not likely to be as big, and we won't likely have as much space. Because of that I need to pare down my clothing yet again (as I do about, oh, every two or three years) and decide what I need to keep and will actually wear on a regular basis as opposed to what I won't and no longer need. Of course, every time I do this sort of sorting I get a little wistful over the past -- some clothing of mine has great sentimental value, whether I wear it all the time or not, and some (of course) doesn't -- but six months after I donate it to charity, I wish I hadn't. That's just me being a packrat, I suppose. I don't need a lot of the stuff I have -- it's better to give it up and let someone else have/use it.
The Newton City-wide Garage Sale is on Saturday, May 3. I am very seriously considering taking out an ad for it this year, arranging everything I don't need/want in the yard and driveway, and just selling/giving away what I can. It will provide some extra money and will let me get rid of a lot of useless shit that's just been sitting around my house for years. I have all sorts of things that I just need to be gone, and a lot of it is too big or bulky to be put in the trash bins on pickup day. The rest of the unwanted stuff, if I have to, I'll put on Craigslist for free just to be rid of it -- or I'll have to call for "large item pickup" from the trash guys. I'll probably have to do that anyway for some of the stuff that just needs to be thrown out, such as my broken futon and broken recliner. As I told Daisy, there's so much shit in this house, and I don't have a need for about 80% of the extra stuff. I just don't. The stuff I need, obviously, will be kept. Everything else needs to go away. And if I can make some cash by selling a lot of it at a garage sale, even if it's not that much, it's worth it to me to make it be gone.
For the stuff I will be keeping and taking with me when I move, I need boxes for it. I need a lot more boxes for it than I currently have. Most of the boxes I have now have already been used for glassware and dishes/other kitchen stuff that I've already boxed up, even the big boxes. Over my next few visits to Walmart I'll have to to up to the service desk and request that they save boxes for me from their truck nights (which, at Walmart, I think is basically every night). I'll probably need about 30 or so boxes just to be able to pack up the majority of my stuff, and well, the more I get the better -- even if I end up with too many and have to recycle some of them. My clothing alone, even after I donate what I don't need to charity, will probably take up a good five or six boxes. My man cave upstairs, another three or four large ones. Kitchen/living room/spare room? About another six to eight. Bathroom? Two more at least. Pantry? Probably another two more. I mean, it's going to be a lot of packing, which is why I'm doing what I can of it right now just to be done with it. The spare room is already half-full of boxes I've packed over the course of the past year.
I really just want to get it all done and be done with it. That's also a big part of why I'm a bit antsy about the wedding -- it's not that I'm nervous or anything like that, because I'm not. I absolutely want to marry Daisy and want to start our lives together. I can't wait for it. And that's the issue. I just want to do it. I've said this before, but we've been engaged for over a year and have been doing nothing but planning and planning ever since. I just want to get the show on the road, so to speak, and execute. Even though we're not, it feels like we're treading water. Time is as time does -- it moves incredibly quickly when you don't want it to, and when you want it to, it won't. It also doesn't help that a fair amount of our expected guests and even members of our wedding parties are dragging their feet and hemming/hawwing over what they're going to do or what their travel plans are, and as such Daisy and I cannot get an accurate number for catering for the event because nobody knows how to RSVP anymore. That's on all of those people, obviously -- come or don't come, but the wedding is still going on regardless, and they have to figure it out if they're coming. Daisy and I have enough other stuff going on between now and then.
As for the "second reception" my parents wanted to do back home, neither of them have said anything about it to me since, oh, January or so -- and who knows when or if it will happen this summer, mainly because in order to be able to survive, Daisy and I will need to be working as much as we can and may not be able to get away from our respective jobs to fly back to West Virginia for it. If it's going to happen, it needs to be set up sooner rather than later. As much as I'd love to be able to go back home for a few days so that the rest of my family and friends there can meet Daisy and have a nice little get-together for us, I'm not sure it's going to be logistically possible, and may be much more trouble than it's worth -- especially if we're both really poor after the wedding and are fighting to pay what bills we have once we get into our new place.
Soooo...yeah. That's what's going on right now. The rest of my afternoon and most of my evening will be spent working around the house and taking care of those aforementioned tasks of packing, cleaning, dividing my wardrobes, and anything/everything else that pops up in the meantime. Fare thee well, folks.
So, I'm already well in the stages of gettin' shit done that I like to be in around this time of year. Remember, this time last year I was freaking out and panicking because I had my comps in a week, and the results of said comps would dictate whether I was going to be able to, y'know, graduate with my Master's degree.
This time around I don't have that hanging over my head, and I've planned ahead for the end of the semester. I just posted my lesson plans for next week -- yes, at least two or three days before I normally do -- and printed out all of the handouts I need for copies for next week. I don't normally do this stuff until Saturday or Sunday.
This is another one of those quite rare weekends where I don't have anything to do for my students, but that's because I'm collecting and/or workshopping papers in my classes this coming week. My classes themselves will be really easy, as my 011s are simply conferencing with me and doing nothing else, my 102s are turning in their papers and are getting their next assignment, and my 210s are turning in drafts. This next week is basically autopilot for me. Autopilot and grading, really. The rest of this semester won't be this simple or easy, but things are starting to wind down a bit -- even when that winding down, in some cases, is really winding up (with last papers being assigned and the like).
Daisy and I have been making more plans, moving plans -- such as the rental of the moving truck and the timeframe for the move. We are going to be on a fairly tight schedule for that, so we have to make sure everything is...well...plotted on specific days and times. It's going to be about $400 for a moving truck for a three-day rental, which covers mileage but not gas. I'll more than likely have to pay for that myself and put it on my credit card. We also need to be able to plan this stuff well in advance so that if anything happens or changes, we can work around those obstacles. As for apartments, Daisy's also found a place about ten blocks or so from her parents' house (read: in a good, nice part of town) that's somewhat affordable/do-able, and she and her parents are going to go look at it next week. I assume it's in a complex or development and that there are new openings all the time, otherwise she wouldn't put it off. This place, if we get it, would give us a good base of operations for around Omaha for the wedding and afterwards, and is (of course) quite close to her parents' place -- which is a plus for both of us. Of course, none of the moving plans can be put into action until we actually get a place up there, which is going to be expensive enough as it is. As our goal is to be completely moved and completely settled before the wedding, this may be easier said than done.
In my own house here in Kansas, I sent out the rent check today and I got paid today (less because of the health insurance thing, but I still got paid), and currently have no other bills that have come in yet. All of my other bills have already been paid or they will arrive over the course of the next few days/week or so. I did my grocery shopping on Monday, as mentioned before, but will more than likely have to go out to do a little bit more either tomorrow night or Sunday night, as the cats are on the last of their litter now (a jug lasts them about two weeks or so, roughly) and I don't have a ton of food in the house. I have some, but not a lot.
The rest of my weekend? It will be spent diving into the job search. Daisy has referred me for several positions within her current company, positions that I could do and/or wouldn't make me want to come home after work and drink myself to death every night were I to work them. I also have found a few other positions to apply for, including at least three more teaching positions and some other academic positions I've seen in different postings. At this point, I'm very much of the mindset that I should just say fuck it and roll the dice -- I need to find something for the summer that's reliable and can keep us in a house and food. Daisy can't do it all by herself and I wouldn't want or ask her to, so I need to get a job that will help support us and will help pay our bills. After all, I'm an adult, and I'll be damned if I'm not going to be a responsible provider and husband to her.
Call it "spring cleaning" if you will, but cleaning is also going to be a large part of my weekend. Or, at least, "spring uncluttering and rearrangements." While it's barely fifty degrees outside today, that's because it's overcast and a cold front has swept through. For the foreseeable future, the temperature is supposed to be in the mid-60s to mid-and-high 70s. Yesterday afternoon it was 73 here before I took a nap in the late afternoon/evening hours. That means, finally, it's time for me to go through my clothes and switch out my wardrobes -- and in doing so, figure out what needs to be kept and what needs to be donated to charity. I live in a decent sized house now, but wherever Daisy and I end up is not likely to be as big, and we won't likely have as much space. Because of that I need to pare down my clothing yet again (as I do about, oh, every two or three years) and decide what I need to keep and will actually wear on a regular basis as opposed to what I won't and no longer need. Of course, every time I do this sort of sorting I get a little wistful over the past -- some clothing of mine has great sentimental value, whether I wear it all the time or not, and some (of course) doesn't -- but six months after I donate it to charity, I wish I hadn't. That's just me being a packrat, I suppose. I don't need a lot of the stuff I have -- it's better to give it up and let someone else have/use it.
The Newton City-wide Garage Sale is on Saturday, May 3. I am very seriously considering taking out an ad for it this year, arranging everything I don't need/want in the yard and driveway, and just selling/giving away what I can. It will provide some extra money and will let me get rid of a lot of useless shit that's just been sitting around my house for years. I have all sorts of things that I just need to be gone, and a lot of it is too big or bulky to be put in the trash bins on pickup day. The rest of the unwanted stuff, if I have to, I'll put on Craigslist for free just to be rid of it -- or I'll have to call for "large item pickup" from the trash guys. I'll probably have to do that anyway for some of the stuff that just needs to be thrown out, such as my broken futon and broken recliner. As I told Daisy, there's so much shit in this house, and I don't have a need for about 80% of the extra stuff. I just don't. The stuff I need, obviously, will be kept. Everything else needs to go away. And if I can make some cash by selling a lot of it at a garage sale, even if it's not that much, it's worth it to me to make it be gone.
For the stuff I will be keeping and taking with me when I move, I need boxes for it. I need a lot more boxes for it than I currently have. Most of the boxes I have now have already been used for glassware and dishes/other kitchen stuff that I've already boxed up, even the big boxes. Over my next few visits to Walmart I'll have to to up to the service desk and request that they save boxes for me from their truck nights (which, at Walmart, I think is basically every night). I'll probably need about 30 or so boxes just to be able to pack up the majority of my stuff, and well, the more I get the better -- even if I end up with too many and have to recycle some of them. My clothing alone, even after I donate what I don't need to charity, will probably take up a good five or six boxes. My man cave upstairs, another three or four large ones. Kitchen/living room/spare room? About another six to eight. Bathroom? Two more at least. Pantry? Probably another two more. I mean, it's going to be a lot of packing, which is why I'm doing what I can of it right now just to be done with it. The spare room is already half-full of boxes I've packed over the course of the past year.
I really just want to get it all done and be done with it. That's also a big part of why I'm a bit antsy about the wedding -- it's not that I'm nervous or anything like that, because I'm not. I absolutely want to marry Daisy and want to start our lives together. I can't wait for it. And that's the issue. I just want to do it. I've said this before, but we've been engaged for over a year and have been doing nothing but planning and planning ever since. I just want to get the show on the road, so to speak, and execute. Even though we're not, it feels like we're treading water. Time is as time does -- it moves incredibly quickly when you don't want it to, and when you want it to, it won't. It also doesn't help that a fair amount of our expected guests and even members of our wedding parties are dragging their feet and hemming/hawwing over what they're going to do or what their travel plans are, and as such Daisy and I cannot get an accurate number for catering for the event because nobody knows how to RSVP anymore. That's on all of those people, obviously -- come or don't come, but the wedding is still going on regardless, and they have to figure it out if they're coming. Daisy and I have enough other stuff going on between now and then.
As for the "second reception" my parents wanted to do back home, neither of them have said anything about it to me since, oh, January or so -- and who knows when or if it will happen this summer, mainly because in order to be able to survive, Daisy and I will need to be working as much as we can and may not be able to get away from our respective jobs to fly back to West Virginia for it. If it's going to happen, it needs to be set up sooner rather than later. As much as I'd love to be able to go back home for a few days so that the rest of my family and friends there can meet Daisy and have a nice little get-together for us, I'm not sure it's going to be logistically possible, and may be much more trouble than it's worth -- especially if we're both really poor after the wedding and are fighting to pay what bills we have once we get into our new place.
Soooo...yeah. That's what's going on right now. The rest of my afternoon and most of my evening will be spent working around the house and taking care of those aforementioned tasks of packing, cleaning, dividing my wardrobes, and anything/everything else that pops up in the meantime. Fare thee well, folks.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
The Month's End
Spring semester: day forty-eight
I've learned in my years as a student and professor that if it's not one thing, it's another. I almost want to get that tattooed somewhere on my body, like across my chest or down my forearm or something. It's less of a motto than it is a reality or certainty most of the time.
Let me explain.
On the Wednesday before a payday, as I've mentioned before, the electronic pay stub goes online for all of the university's employees, classified and unclassified. We can log in and look at it, and see what we're going to get paid two days later when it deposits. We get automated emails to tell us this, and tell us that it's online. So, yesterday, I checked my school email to see that email and remembered "hey, I get paid on Friday, woohoo!" So I logged in to look at my pay stub -- which I don't normally do because generally, my pay is the same every time -- but with the way my payroll was screwed up earlier this semester and this time, with the first of my health/dental/vision insurance charges coming out of my account for the first time, I wanted to see what my paycheck would be like for the rest of the semester.
Because everything was calculated and recalculated when my payroll was redone a month ago, my net pay every check now is $700 before taxes. Once taxes are taken out, it's something like $600 -- a little more, a little less, no biggie. I knew my insurance would cut into that a bit further.
My take-home pay on this pay stub was...a little over $300. What?
I looked down the list of deductions and found that the insurance had mistakenly begun taking out double-coverage for the summer months, which they weren't supposed to do (I specifically asked them not to do that, as there's a 95% certainty that I won't be returning for the fall) as my employment contract for the semester ends at the end of May.
Look, I'd love to have full coverage over the summer, but I'm already really strapped for cash as it is -- I can't have an extra $150 or so taken out of each of my checks from now until the end of May, or I'm not going to have enough money to pay my bills. I got the most basic plan I could simply because I wanted to avoid the Obamacare tax penalty for not having any insurance by the end-of-this-month cutoff date. Again, I never go to the doctor unless I'm bleeding out, missing a limb, or otherwise near death. As none of those scenarios tend to occur, well...
Anyway.
I immediately shot an email off to the payroll/benefits lady who was in charge of implementing my changes and the like when all of these issues popped up before, and she replied -- quite quickly -- with an apology, telling me that she hadn't been told that I hadn't requested summer coverage, and did the work to issue the refund for that to me on my 4/11 check (thankfully, not through a paper check again, but on my normal pay schedule). She then confirmed this with the HR benefits guy, who emailed us both to say that yes, he'd made a mistake in putting through my paperwork and that he'd fixed it on his end as well, and he gave me a rundown of all of the bi-weekly charges I'd have taken out of my checks. The insurance costs me roughly $195 or so per month, a little less than $100 out of each check. That's...do-able, I suppose, for the moment. The dental and vision coverage is stupid cheap, like $3 and $4-something, respectively, each check. Everything else is the basic health insurance plan/prescription coverage, which is $89 per check. That's really not bad, to be honest with you. If I need that coverage for something sometime in the next two months, at least I have it.
Anyway, so that was fixed quickly, and my checks for the rest of the semester should return to somewhat normal with that normal coverage taken out. I'm guessing each check from this point forward will be smaller than the ones I've had before, yes, but not as small as this week's check (obviously). The refund amount is more than $100 that'll be stuck back onto my 4/11 check.
As I told Daisy, as well as her mother, I'm really glad I have those tax refunds coming to me soon, especially when some (or most) of them will go into helping Daisy to pay the rent/deposit on whatever place she finds for us in the next month or so. Obviously, I have enough money to pay my bills and rent right now, so having a smaller check for tomorrow's payday is inconvenient, yes, but it doesn't throw me into financial ruin; I've been doing everything I can to save money and pay off my credit cards and other bills as soon as I get them, and haven't spent any extra money on anything but my necessities and groceries for me and the cats. I'll pay the rent tomorrow and include the new updated information form the landlord asked for as well, though in another two or three months, that information will be outdated anyway when I eventually leave this place.
As for leaving this place? I'm pretty sure, again, with about 95% certainty, that I'll not return to the university in the fall and my tenure as a professor in the Department of English will end in May. The Director, as I talked to him Tuesday about the fraternity bill thing and the flyer, didn't bring up anything new about the position I was supposed to be offered there if the funding was available, which tells me that he didn't know anything else about it (we've talked about it at length for a good two years or so now; he'd tell me if he had any news, believe me). So yes, my focus from this point forward has to turn to new positions and jobs in the Omaha area, something that I'll be diving into with great vigor once more this weekend -- I'll be applying for several more positions at different colleges, universities, and companies up there. Daisy gave me a referral for a training position within her company, a position where I'd be teaching the new recruits the ins-and-outs of the business systems there. I have the knowledge, degrees, and experience required to do it, the trainers operate on rotating schedules that would leave me with a good amount of free time and downtime, and they get paid really well. Well enough to where I'd be able to buy a new(er) car and we'd never have to worry about our household bills, I'll put it that way. And, apparently, they need new trainers and more of them. So, I'm going to use her referral and apply for that this weekend, as well as some other jobs in the area that I've saved and set aside for when I have the hour or so apiece to go through their application processes. University jobs, especially teaching positions, have excruciatingly long application processes most of the time.
Meanwhile, Daisy herself has applied for a supervisor position within her own company, which comes with a much larger salary for what she already essentially does now. She's also applied for various other good, higher-paying positions around the city that she has a good shot at getting at least a callback or interview for.
This morning I just have workshops in my 102 class, and then I return home for my weekend. I don't have to do any shopping (as normally on Thursdays, I do) because I did that on Monday, so really I just get to come home, eat, and go back to bed if I want. I didn't sleep that well last night, and because it's been warm-ish, muggy, and rainy for the past two days, my weather allergies are really bothering me today. Aside from minor student stuff and lesson planning over the course of the weekend, there's not a whole lot else I have to do. I have to pay the rent, and I should probably vacuum the house again and run the dishwasher, but that's about it. I'd like to switch out my wardrobes (which I mentioned before) to be able to go through my stuff and switch over to more spring/summer clothing while picking/filtering out stuff to donate to charity as well, but that heavily depends on the weather forecast for the next week or two. I should also try to box up some more stuff around the house so that it's less to pack up when I do the bulk of my packing and cleaning of this place in preparation to move out, but that's going to depend on how much time I have.
On that note, I'm off to class.
I've learned in my years as a student and professor that if it's not one thing, it's another. I almost want to get that tattooed somewhere on my body, like across my chest or down my forearm or something. It's less of a motto than it is a reality or certainty most of the time.
Let me explain.
On the Wednesday before a payday, as I've mentioned before, the electronic pay stub goes online for all of the university's employees, classified and unclassified. We can log in and look at it, and see what we're going to get paid two days later when it deposits. We get automated emails to tell us this, and tell us that it's online. So, yesterday, I checked my school email to see that email and remembered "hey, I get paid on Friday, woohoo!" So I logged in to look at my pay stub -- which I don't normally do because generally, my pay is the same every time -- but with the way my payroll was screwed up earlier this semester and this time, with the first of my health/dental/vision insurance charges coming out of my account for the first time, I wanted to see what my paycheck would be like for the rest of the semester.
Because everything was calculated and recalculated when my payroll was redone a month ago, my net pay every check now is $700 before taxes. Once taxes are taken out, it's something like $600 -- a little more, a little less, no biggie. I knew my insurance would cut into that a bit further.
My take-home pay on this pay stub was...a little over $300. What?
I looked down the list of deductions and found that the insurance had mistakenly begun taking out double-coverage for the summer months, which they weren't supposed to do (I specifically asked them not to do that, as there's a 95% certainty that I won't be returning for the fall) as my employment contract for the semester ends at the end of May.
Look, I'd love to have full coverage over the summer, but I'm already really strapped for cash as it is -- I can't have an extra $150 or so taken out of each of my checks from now until the end of May, or I'm not going to have enough money to pay my bills. I got the most basic plan I could simply because I wanted to avoid the Obamacare tax penalty for not having any insurance by the end-of-this-month cutoff date. Again, I never go to the doctor unless I'm bleeding out, missing a limb, or otherwise near death. As none of those scenarios tend to occur, well...
Anyway.
I immediately shot an email off to the payroll/benefits lady who was in charge of implementing my changes and the like when all of these issues popped up before, and she replied -- quite quickly -- with an apology, telling me that she hadn't been told that I hadn't requested summer coverage, and did the work to issue the refund for that to me on my 4/11 check (thankfully, not through a paper check again, but on my normal pay schedule). She then confirmed this with the HR benefits guy, who emailed us both to say that yes, he'd made a mistake in putting through my paperwork and that he'd fixed it on his end as well, and he gave me a rundown of all of the bi-weekly charges I'd have taken out of my checks. The insurance costs me roughly $195 or so per month, a little less than $100 out of each check. That's...do-able, I suppose, for the moment. The dental and vision coverage is stupid cheap, like $3 and $4-something, respectively, each check. Everything else is the basic health insurance plan/prescription coverage, which is $89 per check. That's really not bad, to be honest with you. If I need that coverage for something sometime in the next two months, at least I have it.
Anyway, so that was fixed quickly, and my checks for the rest of the semester should return to somewhat normal with that normal coverage taken out. I'm guessing each check from this point forward will be smaller than the ones I've had before, yes, but not as small as this week's check (obviously). The refund amount is more than $100 that'll be stuck back onto my 4/11 check.
As I told Daisy, as well as her mother, I'm really glad I have those tax refunds coming to me soon, especially when some (or most) of them will go into helping Daisy to pay the rent/deposit on whatever place she finds for us in the next month or so. Obviously, I have enough money to pay my bills and rent right now, so having a smaller check for tomorrow's payday is inconvenient, yes, but it doesn't throw me into financial ruin; I've been doing everything I can to save money and pay off my credit cards and other bills as soon as I get them, and haven't spent any extra money on anything but my necessities and groceries for me and the cats. I'll pay the rent tomorrow and include the new updated information form the landlord asked for as well, though in another two or three months, that information will be outdated anyway when I eventually leave this place.
As for leaving this place? I'm pretty sure, again, with about 95% certainty, that I'll not return to the university in the fall and my tenure as a professor in the Department of English will end in May. The Director, as I talked to him Tuesday about the fraternity bill thing and the flyer, didn't bring up anything new about the position I was supposed to be offered there if the funding was available, which tells me that he didn't know anything else about it (we've talked about it at length for a good two years or so now; he'd tell me if he had any news, believe me). So yes, my focus from this point forward has to turn to new positions and jobs in the Omaha area, something that I'll be diving into with great vigor once more this weekend -- I'll be applying for several more positions at different colleges, universities, and companies up there. Daisy gave me a referral for a training position within her company, a position where I'd be teaching the new recruits the ins-and-outs of the business systems there. I have the knowledge, degrees, and experience required to do it, the trainers operate on rotating schedules that would leave me with a good amount of free time and downtime, and they get paid really well. Well enough to where I'd be able to buy a new(er) car and we'd never have to worry about our household bills, I'll put it that way. And, apparently, they need new trainers and more of them. So, I'm going to use her referral and apply for that this weekend, as well as some other jobs in the area that I've saved and set aside for when I have the hour or so apiece to go through their application processes. University jobs, especially teaching positions, have excruciatingly long application processes most of the time.
Meanwhile, Daisy herself has applied for a supervisor position within her own company, which comes with a much larger salary for what she already essentially does now. She's also applied for various other good, higher-paying positions around the city that she has a good shot at getting at least a callback or interview for.
This morning I just have workshops in my 102 class, and then I return home for my weekend. I don't have to do any shopping (as normally on Thursdays, I do) because I did that on Monday, so really I just get to come home, eat, and go back to bed if I want. I didn't sleep that well last night, and because it's been warm-ish, muggy, and rainy for the past two days, my weather allergies are really bothering me today. Aside from minor student stuff and lesson planning over the course of the weekend, there's not a whole lot else I have to do. I have to pay the rent, and I should probably vacuum the house again and run the dishwasher, but that's about it. I'd like to switch out my wardrobes (which I mentioned before) to be able to go through my stuff and switch over to more spring/summer clothing while picking/filtering out stuff to donate to charity as well, but that heavily depends on the weather forecast for the next week or two. I should also try to box up some more stuff around the house so that it's less to pack up when I do the bulk of my packing and cleaning of this place in preparation to move out, but that's going to depend on how much time I have.
On that note, I'm off to class.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
It's Chinatown, Jake.
Spring semester: day forty-seven
Yesterday was a day that started out strangely, and only got more strange as the day went on. No, seriously. It may have been one of the top five strangest days of my entire teaching career, and that's saying something. I've had some pretty weird days in my time.
It all started when I got to the main campus. Everything before that was normal. I stopped to get gas this morning, I put the fuel cleaner in the tank with the gas, and drove south. My first class, on West campus, was fine -- I taught my students, I drove over to main campus, parked and took the shuttle down to my building, and went upstairs to the department as per the usual.
There's this saying that if something weird or strange is going to happen at the university, it's going to somehow tie back to, or otherwise start in, the Department of English. It's a long-held belief by those of us who have been there long enough to have seen a lot of weird shit happen over the years, and it's mostly unexplained. Stuff just happens up there, or gets started up there, that most people would define as extremely odd -- and I'm fairly sure it doesn't happen in most other departments at most other universities.
I got off the elevator to see my office door open. Hm, I thought, I guess my officemate is in today. Mind you, my officemate is never in the office at the same time I am. I haven't even seen him since the first day of the semester in January, and one of his students dropped off a paper when I was in the office on March 4th. I left a note on said paper saying when said student had dropped it off, and left it on his desk. It has remained in the same spot on his desk, with the same note on it, since that day. This tells me he's not been in the office at all this month.
I wouldn't know, though, as I'm only there one day per week.
Anyway. So my door was open about halfway or so. As I approached my office, I saw that, well, my laptop and coffee pot were still there, so it's not like anyone had broken in to steal my stuff. I opened the door the rest of the way and ran into something hard -- it was a man, on a ladder, halfway in my ceiling and half below, running wires into the room.
Ooookay.
I apologized, put my bag down, and ventured down to the main office, where I asked our administrator something to the effect of "Do you know why there's a man hanging halfway out of my office's ceiling?"
"He's installing the spy cameras," she said, smirking. "No, they're finally fixing the internet in your office -- they're running new cables and putting in another jack."
The wall port for ethernet in my office has never worked for the past almost-year I've been in that office. The port is completely dead/fried and gives no internet on any of the computers in there. As we were all just given fancy new Dell all-in-one desktop machines at the beginning of the semester, this has been a problem -- those machines have basically been paperweights ever since they were put in our office. My laptop has wifi (it's not that old), but I've never been able to access the secure campus network with it no matter what I do, even though I've followed all of the directions for manual setup and am making sure everything is running the way it's supposed to be. So, for network access from my office, I've been forced to use the school's guest network, which is incredibly shitty and unreliable, barely gives me any signal at all, and frequently kicks me off. In my old office, I just jacked the laptop into the ethernet port on the wall and always had always-on, lightning-fast speed with no issue whatsoever.
"Oh, good," I said. And I stayed out of the guy's way while he worked, which meant doing a fair amount of my work outside the office for a while.
It didn't really matter, as I had some errands to run anyway -- for one, I had the wedding invitations I had to give out to everyone in the department who was there, and I had to make sure they were put in the mailboxes of everyone I wouldn't see yesterday, and handed personally to those folks I would or did see.
Upon going to my colleague's office next door to give him his invitation, he asked me "Want to see something interesting? Look what I pulled off of the bulletin board in the engineering building this morning." And he handed me a flyer with those little pull-tabs on the bottom for phone numbers and email addresses.
It was quite possibly the most...disconcerting flyer I've seen the entire time I've been in academia -- both as a student and as a professor.
This flyer advertised a paper-writing service -- $10 per page, you pick the subject matter, citation style, and required length/grade level, and the people who run this certain website will write your papers for you.
As a professor, the very concept of this "service" angers me greatly. I was even more angered when I went to the website and read the FAQ page, which said this:
"increasingly unaware of individual student needs"? Boo fucking hoo. You're not a special little snowflake, you don't need or deserve individual attention because of who you are. You're a student at a university. You have a job, and that job is to be a student who does their own work and/or succeeds (or fails) on their own merits -- and if you can't succeed on your own merits, skills, and knowledge gained while you're a student, perhaps you shouldn't be a student in the first place. We'll always need people to run checkout counters at grocery stores or make our Arby's roast beef sandwiches and curly fries. That may sound harsh, but I've been battle-hardened by being a teacher for several years now.
Also, "general laziness on the part of educators"? I bust my ass for my students and for my job in general -- I work long hours, I assign and grade up to and including 300 papers and exams every semester (at least four papers for each class of students I teach, if it's full; my 011 class has six papers, and my 210 class has seven, so by rough estimate, this semester alone, even with classes that aren't completely full, I'm grading 250+). I stay up late answering questions in emails from students. I create intricate lesson plans that, yes, are all made available on Blackboard in PDF format so that if my students miss something, they can go get it and read it for themselves. I give my students the benefit of the doubt, and I am as helpful and compassionate in their learning as I can possibly be. I take, as you may know, great pride in my job. Have I had professors in the past, especially as an undergraduate, who didn't put this much effort into their classes for their students? Yes, of course I have. I have always wanted to be the professor that cared more, that did more, that truly wanted to see his students succeed. But I want to see them succeed honestly.
So, "services" like this irk me, in short.
We made copies of the flyers and distributed them to the heads of the programs within the department -- I made sure everyone in charge of the various composition programs was aware of this site and its service, and to be on the lookout for papers coming in from their students that were much better and/or different than what said students have produced in the past. The Director of the Writing Center made a copy of the flyer, along with a printout of some of the pages on the website, and sent it over to the engineering school dean as a memo that these flyers were being posted in their building.
Overreaction? Possibly. But what concerned us the most is that the website advertised that papers could be written for any level -- high school all the way up through Master's and PhD-level theses and dissertations. You get a student who has no clue what he/she is doing but has a lot of money, and they could coast through college or a graduate program without learning anything at all, paying their way through papers, theses, and dissertations to get a degree that they haven't earned and have no clue how to use...that's a big, big problem.
"The problem here is that, well..." I said to the Writing Center director, "that's probably not the only flyer that's been posted on this campus. There are probably hundreds of them scattered around the bulletin boards and signposts. And students will see them and use them."
Upon telling this story to Daisy last night, she said, "You know, there are probably hundreds of websites just like this one."
"Yes," I replied, "but this one is advertising on our campus. Which means that someone affiliated with it, somehow -- whether it's one of their writers or otherwise -- is working on this campus somewhere."
"Well, how hard could it be to figure out who's putting up the flyers?" she asked. "Don't you have security cameras on campus?"
"Psh," I said, "shit no. We have cameras in the parking lots, but that's about it. We're a third-tier university in this state. They can't even afford to pay me a living wage; do you think they can afford security cameras?"
I think I make a pretty valid point here.
Anyway.
Once the flyers were dealt with and there was no longer a man hanging out of the ceiling in my office, the day got even weirder. I checked my mailbox in the department to find an envelope, mailed to me at the university's address, that looked like a bill.
Mind you, I don't get mail at the university. Occasionally I'll get a textbook catalog or a pamphlet or something mailed to me, as I am a professor there, of course -- but I don't get mail there. And I certainly don't get bills there.
I opened it up, and it was a bill. For $400.00. Addressed to me, from a company handling membership dues for the university's chapter of a fraternity -- a fraternity that, of course, I've never heard of, have never applied to be a member of, and have never wanted to be a member of. The bill was for Spring 2014 membership dues, for the first half of the semester. What?
This, needless to say, was odd.
I took it to the Director and asked if he'd ever seen anything like this before. He looked at it, eyeballed it for a few minutes, and concluded that no, he hadn't -- but it sounded like it could possibly be a phishing scheme, where someone who looks like a legit company is randomly sending bills to people for fraternity dues to see if they'll pay them, thinking it slipped their mind.
"I thought it could be something like that too," I said, "because otherwise, why would they mail this to me at school instead of at home? I've never gotten any real mail here on campus that wasn't campus-oriented, and certainly no bills for things I've never requested and have never heard of."
"Especially since you're no longer a student," he said.
His suggestion was that I take it to our new department chair -- a nice lady who I never had for class, but has been at the university for many years and is the guru of the Master's program. Truth be told, I'd only had a small handful of only two-or-three-line conversations with the woman in the almost five years I've been in the department; she doesn't really know me very well at all. Well, now's as good a time as any to get somewhat acquainted, right?
We sat down in her office and I explained the situation. She also thought it could be some sort of phishing scam, despite the fact that it looked really legit (the bill looked nicer than my actual bills I get every month for utilities or credit cards, and included a lot of official information with it). She decided to take it to the next level.
"I think we should call the campus police and report this as a possible phishing scheme," she said.
"Okay," I said, shrugging.
At this point I really didn't know what to make of things, or make of the day itself overall. I'd already dealt with the whole "we'll write your papers for $10 a page" flyer and website, and I still had to spend the remainder of my afternoon and early evening grading through papers and making lesson plans for my night class. I really didn't have the time or patience for this sort of frustration or problem.
She had a brief conversation with one of the campus police officers on the phone, and they said they'd send someone over to look at it/talk about it. I thanked her, and told her I'd keep her posted on what I found out.
In the meantime, I went back to my office. The company who had sent the bill on behalf of the university's fraternity organization was a company called Omega Fi, whose only business is processing transactions and payments for fraternities/sororities nationwide. They're a big company. So I did some research on them -- I went to their website and I did some detective work to see if anyone else had gotten anything questionable or otherwise along these lines that could be deemed as "scam-worthy."
The Omega Fi website is Better Business Bureau certified with a 100% good rating. And there wasn't a single scam report or complaint about them anywhere I could find on the web. Like it or not, it looked like this $400 bill to me, for a service/fraternity I was never and had never been a member of, was completely legit.
You've got to be shitting me, I thought. There's no way -- NO WAY -- I'm paying a $400 bill for nothing, and no way this is right.
Frustrated, I looked through the other papers included with the bill, including a letter that told me about why I was getting it...from the fraternity itself. At the bottom of this letter, I noticed something that I'd overlooked before -- a small, one-line statement that said "Like us on Facebook!" and gave the link to our university's chapter of the fraternity on Facebook.
Okay, I thought. Barring anything else, I can get on there and see if they have contact info at the university or a room/building number so I can go over there and sort this out.
Since I now had lightning-fast, reliable internet access in my office again, that's what I did -- I went right to the fraternity chapter's Facebook page for our university. And here's where it got really weird.
The very first post on the page at the top -- the VERY FIRST -- said something along the lines of "We'd like to welcome [my name] to our fraternity as our newest member -- he's an outgoing, fun-loving guy who we're sure will be a great new fraternity brother."
What the shit?
It included a picture. That picture was a guy, yes. But that guy was not me.
Aha.
I took the entire bill down to the office, where the administrator was. The administrator has access to school records.
"Type my name into the directory," I said, "and do a search."
"What for?" she asked, looking at me like I was an idiot.
"You'll see."
She did.
"How many names pop up?" I asked.
"Two," she said, surprised.
"I knew it," I said, and explained the situation to her, showing her the bill and the like.
There are two of us at the university with the exact same name -- me, the professor who's been here for almost five years now, and this kid, who is a brand-new, incoming freshman starting this year. We have different middle names/initials, but that's it. He joined a fraternity this semester. I looked at the bill again, specifically the mailing address -- it was sent to the university, but simply to the university's main address. Guess who the university has on file for that main address when they look up a name/department? Me, the professor who has been here for years, not this kid. So it was sorted and shipped over to the Department of English, where his fraternity bill arrived in my mailbox.
I had the administrator pull off his mailing address -- his permanent, home address -- and write it down for me. I don't have access to that database as a simple lecturer/professor unless it's for one of my own students. When that was done, I wrote him a letter saying something along the lines of "Congratulations! You're not alone at this university, for we share the same name. Unfortunately, this also means that I was sent your fraternity bill for the spring. I'd change my billing/mailing address if I were you when you pay it. Hope this finds you well, and sorry to be the bearer of a bill." Signed, my name, Academic Lecturer, Department of English, etc. And I stuck it in the outgoing mail box.
For fuck's sake, right?
Looking back on it now, it shouldn't have taken Sherlockian detective work to figure this all out, but still. Let me tell you, for a guy that's barely making ends meet as it is, seeing a $400 bill appear in my mailbox out of the blue with no real explanation is pretty troubling. I'm lucky I did research and looked into it more deeply; my first instinct was that it was some sort of bullshit phishing scheme, and I almost shredded it in the copy room. The only reason I didn't is because I'm already in enough debt from my own credit cards and student loans that I didn't want one more thing to add to that if it was a legitimate mistake. Mistake or not, even if the bill were truly issued to me, even in error, it would still affect my credit score and the like if it went unpaid. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about that. Whether the kid pays his fraternity dues or not is on him, not me.
So. I updated the department chair and the director on the situation, and called the university police to cancel the report and to explain to them everything about what had happened as well. They found it somewhat amusing, to be honest, and the police station guy on the phone was very nice and friendly about it. And so that was that.
Because I'd dealt with that all day, though, I was mentally exhausted, it was close to 4PM, and if I didn't want to be working all day today on student papers for my 102 workshops, I had to force myself to focus on those and get them done, as well as my lesson plans for my 011 class that night, as I'd been too tired on Monday night to formally write them out. I got about halfway done with that stuff before I had to go to class; I did the lesson plans haphazardly, just enough to let me know what I was covering in what order, and got through half of the workshop copies (I did the others earlier this afternoon).
My 011 class, after returning from Spring Break, was a barren wasteland -- I had eight students there...out of nineteen on my roster. Truth be told, I may have fewer on my roster now (some may have dropped), and at least two students have already failed for absences and have been notified of that. I'll have three or four more who fail for absences if they miss next week's class. The students who showed up are the ones who do their work (well, most of them) and are actually doing quite well in the course -- so, again, I know it's not me. I need to talk to the director's wife about this to bring her up to proverbial speed (as she runs the remedial/ESL programs), but she's been really ill as of late, so she's not been on campus when I've been there -- usually she has some of the same office hours I do. If she's ill, I'm guessing she's not checking her email either for the most part, and far be it from me to bug someone when they're sick.
So yes, yesterday was really, really weird. Let's hope the rest of my week isn't that strange.
Oh, and bonus points for anyone who gets the joke/reference in the title of this post as it pertains the the subject matter of said post.
Yesterday was a day that started out strangely, and only got more strange as the day went on. No, seriously. It may have been one of the top five strangest days of my entire teaching career, and that's saying something. I've had some pretty weird days in my time.
It all started when I got to the main campus. Everything before that was normal. I stopped to get gas this morning, I put the fuel cleaner in the tank with the gas, and drove south. My first class, on West campus, was fine -- I taught my students, I drove over to main campus, parked and took the shuttle down to my building, and went upstairs to the department as per the usual.
There's this saying that if something weird or strange is going to happen at the university, it's going to somehow tie back to, or otherwise start in, the Department of English. It's a long-held belief by those of us who have been there long enough to have seen a lot of weird shit happen over the years, and it's mostly unexplained. Stuff just happens up there, or gets started up there, that most people would define as extremely odd -- and I'm fairly sure it doesn't happen in most other departments at most other universities.
I got off the elevator to see my office door open. Hm, I thought, I guess my officemate is in today. Mind you, my officemate is never in the office at the same time I am. I haven't even seen him since the first day of the semester in January, and one of his students dropped off a paper when I was in the office on March 4th. I left a note on said paper saying when said student had dropped it off, and left it on his desk. It has remained in the same spot on his desk, with the same note on it, since that day. This tells me he's not been in the office at all this month.
I wouldn't know, though, as I'm only there one day per week.
Anyway. So my door was open about halfway or so. As I approached my office, I saw that, well, my laptop and coffee pot were still there, so it's not like anyone had broken in to steal my stuff. I opened the door the rest of the way and ran into something hard -- it was a man, on a ladder, halfway in my ceiling and half below, running wires into the room.
Ooookay.
I apologized, put my bag down, and ventured down to the main office, where I asked our administrator something to the effect of "Do you know why there's a man hanging halfway out of my office's ceiling?"
"He's installing the spy cameras," she said, smirking. "No, they're finally fixing the internet in your office -- they're running new cables and putting in another jack."
The wall port for ethernet in my office has never worked for the past almost-year I've been in that office. The port is completely dead/fried and gives no internet on any of the computers in there. As we were all just given fancy new Dell all-in-one desktop machines at the beginning of the semester, this has been a problem -- those machines have basically been paperweights ever since they were put in our office. My laptop has wifi (it's not that old), but I've never been able to access the secure campus network with it no matter what I do, even though I've followed all of the directions for manual setup and am making sure everything is running the way it's supposed to be. So, for network access from my office, I've been forced to use the school's guest network, which is incredibly shitty and unreliable, barely gives me any signal at all, and frequently kicks me off. In my old office, I just jacked the laptop into the ethernet port on the wall and always had always-on, lightning-fast speed with no issue whatsoever.
"Oh, good," I said. And I stayed out of the guy's way while he worked, which meant doing a fair amount of my work outside the office for a while.
It didn't really matter, as I had some errands to run anyway -- for one, I had the wedding invitations I had to give out to everyone in the department who was there, and I had to make sure they were put in the mailboxes of everyone I wouldn't see yesterday, and handed personally to those folks I would or did see.
Upon going to my colleague's office next door to give him his invitation, he asked me "Want to see something interesting? Look what I pulled off of the bulletin board in the engineering building this morning." And he handed me a flyer with those little pull-tabs on the bottom for phone numbers and email addresses.
It was quite possibly the most...disconcerting flyer I've seen the entire time I've been in academia -- both as a student and as a professor.
This flyer advertised a paper-writing service -- $10 per page, you pick the subject matter, citation style, and required length/grade level, and the people who run this certain website will write your papers for you.
As a professor, the very concept of this "service" angers me greatly. I was even more angered when I went to the website and read the FAQ page, which said this:
"increasingly unaware of individual student needs"? Boo fucking hoo. You're not a special little snowflake, you don't need or deserve individual attention because of who you are. You're a student at a university. You have a job, and that job is to be a student who does their own work and/or succeeds (or fails) on their own merits -- and if you can't succeed on your own merits, skills, and knowledge gained while you're a student, perhaps you shouldn't be a student in the first place. We'll always need people to run checkout counters at grocery stores or make our Arby's roast beef sandwiches and curly fries. That may sound harsh, but I've been battle-hardened by being a teacher for several years now.
Also, "general laziness on the part of educators"? I bust my ass for my students and for my job in general -- I work long hours, I assign and grade up to and including 300 papers and exams every semester (at least four papers for each class of students I teach, if it's full; my 011 class has six papers, and my 210 class has seven, so by rough estimate, this semester alone, even with classes that aren't completely full, I'm grading 250+). I stay up late answering questions in emails from students. I create intricate lesson plans that, yes, are all made available on Blackboard in PDF format so that if my students miss something, they can go get it and read it for themselves. I give my students the benefit of the doubt, and I am as helpful and compassionate in their learning as I can possibly be. I take, as you may know, great pride in my job. Have I had professors in the past, especially as an undergraduate, who didn't put this much effort into their classes for their students? Yes, of course I have. I have always wanted to be the professor that cared more, that did more, that truly wanted to see his students succeed. But I want to see them succeed honestly.
So, "services" like this irk me, in short.
We made copies of the flyers and distributed them to the heads of the programs within the department -- I made sure everyone in charge of the various composition programs was aware of this site and its service, and to be on the lookout for papers coming in from their students that were much better and/or different than what said students have produced in the past. The Director of the Writing Center made a copy of the flyer, along with a printout of some of the pages on the website, and sent it over to the engineering school dean as a memo that these flyers were being posted in their building.
Overreaction? Possibly. But what concerned us the most is that the website advertised that papers could be written for any level -- high school all the way up through Master's and PhD-level theses and dissertations. You get a student who has no clue what he/she is doing but has a lot of money, and they could coast through college or a graduate program without learning anything at all, paying their way through papers, theses, and dissertations to get a degree that they haven't earned and have no clue how to use...that's a big, big problem.
"The problem here is that, well..." I said to the Writing Center director, "that's probably not the only flyer that's been posted on this campus. There are probably hundreds of them scattered around the bulletin boards and signposts. And students will see them and use them."
Upon telling this story to Daisy last night, she said, "You know, there are probably hundreds of websites just like this one."
"Yes," I replied, "but this one is advertising on our campus. Which means that someone affiliated with it, somehow -- whether it's one of their writers or otherwise -- is working on this campus somewhere."
"Well, how hard could it be to figure out who's putting up the flyers?" she asked. "Don't you have security cameras on campus?"
"Psh," I said, "shit no. We have cameras in the parking lots, but that's about it. We're a third-tier university in this state. They can't even afford to pay me a living wage; do you think they can afford security cameras?"
I think I make a pretty valid point here.
Anyway.
Once the flyers were dealt with and there was no longer a man hanging out of the ceiling in my office, the day got even weirder. I checked my mailbox in the department to find an envelope, mailed to me at the university's address, that looked like a bill.
Mind you, I don't get mail at the university. Occasionally I'll get a textbook catalog or a pamphlet or something mailed to me, as I am a professor there, of course -- but I don't get mail there. And I certainly don't get bills there.
I opened it up, and it was a bill. For $400.00. Addressed to me, from a company handling membership dues for the university's chapter of a fraternity -- a fraternity that, of course, I've never heard of, have never applied to be a member of, and have never wanted to be a member of. The bill was for Spring 2014 membership dues, for the first half of the semester. What?
This, needless to say, was odd.
I took it to the Director and asked if he'd ever seen anything like this before. He looked at it, eyeballed it for a few minutes, and concluded that no, he hadn't -- but it sounded like it could possibly be a phishing scheme, where someone who looks like a legit company is randomly sending bills to people for fraternity dues to see if they'll pay them, thinking it slipped their mind.
"I thought it could be something like that too," I said, "because otherwise, why would they mail this to me at school instead of at home? I've never gotten any real mail here on campus that wasn't campus-oriented, and certainly no bills for things I've never requested and have never heard of."
"Especially since you're no longer a student," he said.
His suggestion was that I take it to our new department chair -- a nice lady who I never had for class, but has been at the university for many years and is the guru of the Master's program. Truth be told, I'd only had a small handful of only two-or-three-line conversations with the woman in the almost five years I've been in the department; she doesn't really know me very well at all. Well, now's as good a time as any to get somewhat acquainted, right?
We sat down in her office and I explained the situation. She also thought it could be some sort of phishing scam, despite the fact that it looked really legit (the bill looked nicer than my actual bills I get every month for utilities or credit cards, and included a lot of official information with it). She decided to take it to the next level.
"I think we should call the campus police and report this as a possible phishing scheme," she said.
"Okay," I said, shrugging.
At this point I really didn't know what to make of things, or make of the day itself overall. I'd already dealt with the whole "we'll write your papers for $10 a page" flyer and website, and I still had to spend the remainder of my afternoon and early evening grading through papers and making lesson plans for my night class. I really didn't have the time or patience for this sort of frustration or problem.
She had a brief conversation with one of the campus police officers on the phone, and they said they'd send someone over to look at it/talk about it. I thanked her, and told her I'd keep her posted on what I found out.
In the meantime, I went back to my office. The company who had sent the bill on behalf of the university's fraternity organization was a company called Omega Fi, whose only business is processing transactions and payments for fraternities/sororities nationwide. They're a big company. So I did some research on them -- I went to their website and I did some detective work to see if anyone else had gotten anything questionable or otherwise along these lines that could be deemed as "scam-worthy."
The Omega Fi website is Better Business Bureau certified with a 100% good rating. And there wasn't a single scam report or complaint about them anywhere I could find on the web. Like it or not, it looked like this $400 bill to me, for a service/fraternity I was never and had never been a member of, was completely legit.
You've got to be shitting me, I thought. There's no way -- NO WAY -- I'm paying a $400 bill for nothing, and no way this is right.
Frustrated, I looked through the other papers included with the bill, including a letter that told me about why I was getting it...from the fraternity itself. At the bottom of this letter, I noticed something that I'd overlooked before -- a small, one-line statement that said "Like us on Facebook!" and gave the link to our university's chapter of the fraternity on Facebook.
Okay, I thought. Barring anything else, I can get on there and see if they have contact info at the university or a room/building number so I can go over there and sort this out.
Since I now had lightning-fast, reliable internet access in my office again, that's what I did -- I went right to the fraternity chapter's Facebook page for our university. And here's where it got really weird.
The very first post on the page at the top -- the VERY FIRST -- said something along the lines of "We'd like to welcome [my name] to our fraternity as our newest member -- he's an outgoing, fun-loving guy who we're sure will be a great new fraternity brother."
What the shit?
It included a picture. That picture was a guy, yes. But that guy was not me.
Aha.
I took the entire bill down to the office, where the administrator was. The administrator has access to school records.
"Type my name into the directory," I said, "and do a search."
"What for?" she asked, looking at me like I was an idiot.
"You'll see."
She did.
"How many names pop up?" I asked.
"Two," she said, surprised.
"I knew it," I said, and explained the situation to her, showing her the bill and the like.
There are two of us at the university with the exact same name -- me, the professor who's been here for almost five years now, and this kid, who is a brand-new, incoming freshman starting this year. We have different middle names/initials, but that's it. He joined a fraternity this semester. I looked at the bill again, specifically the mailing address -- it was sent to the university, but simply to the university's main address. Guess who the university has on file for that main address when they look up a name/department? Me, the professor who has been here for years, not this kid. So it was sorted and shipped over to the Department of English, where his fraternity bill arrived in my mailbox.
I had the administrator pull off his mailing address -- his permanent, home address -- and write it down for me. I don't have access to that database as a simple lecturer/professor unless it's for one of my own students. When that was done, I wrote him a letter saying something along the lines of "Congratulations! You're not alone at this university, for we share the same name. Unfortunately, this also means that I was sent your fraternity bill for the spring. I'd change my billing/mailing address if I were you when you pay it. Hope this finds you well, and sorry to be the bearer of a bill." Signed, my name, Academic Lecturer, Department of English, etc. And I stuck it in the outgoing mail box.
For fuck's sake, right?
Looking back on it now, it shouldn't have taken Sherlockian detective work to figure this all out, but still. Let me tell you, for a guy that's barely making ends meet as it is, seeing a $400 bill appear in my mailbox out of the blue with no real explanation is pretty troubling. I'm lucky I did research and looked into it more deeply; my first instinct was that it was some sort of bullshit phishing scheme, and I almost shredded it in the copy room. The only reason I didn't is because I'm already in enough debt from my own credit cards and student loans that I didn't want one more thing to add to that if it was a legitimate mistake. Mistake or not, even if the bill were truly issued to me, even in error, it would still affect my credit score and the like if it went unpaid. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about that. Whether the kid pays his fraternity dues or not is on him, not me.
So. I updated the department chair and the director on the situation, and called the university police to cancel the report and to explain to them everything about what had happened as well. They found it somewhat amusing, to be honest, and the police station guy on the phone was very nice and friendly about it. And so that was that.
Because I'd dealt with that all day, though, I was mentally exhausted, it was close to 4PM, and if I didn't want to be working all day today on student papers for my 102 workshops, I had to force myself to focus on those and get them done, as well as my lesson plans for my 011 class that night, as I'd been too tired on Monday night to formally write them out. I got about halfway done with that stuff before I had to go to class; I did the lesson plans haphazardly, just enough to let me know what I was covering in what order, and got through half of the workshop copies (I did the others earlier this afternoon).
My 011 class, after returning from Spring Break, was a barren wasteland -- I had eight students there...out of nineteen on my roster. Truth be told, I may have fewer on my roster now (some may have dropped), and at least two students have already failed for absences and have been notified of that. I'll have three or four more who fail for absences if they miss next week's class. The students who showed up are the ones who do their work (well, most of them) and are actually doing quite well in the course -- so, again, I know it's not me. I need to talk to the director's wife about this to bring her up to proverbial speed (as she runs the remedial/ESL programs), but she's been really ill as of late, so she's not been on campus when I've been there -- usually she has some of the same office hours I do. If she's ill, I'm guessing she's not checking her email either for the most part, and far be it from me to bug someone when they're sick.
So yes, yesterday was really, really weird. Let's hope the rest of my week isn't that strange.
Oh, and bonus points for anyone who gets the joke/reference in the title of this post as it pertains the the subject matter of said post.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Return to Normality
Spring semester: day forty-six
So today I return to my job, the status quo, back to normal teaching and sleeping schedules for the foreseeable future. My Spring Break ended last night, and from this point forward it's the proverbial mad rush to the end of the semester.
Don't get me wrong; I don't necessarily want to return to teaching this week and for the next seven or so weeks total, but I do like my job and I do like the routine of it. When I'm given a lot of unstructured time (such as on breaks between semesters), I tend to get depressed, usually because I have all the time in the world to do whatever I want or need to do, but because I'm not working during that time, I don't have the money to do anything. That's what causes more of my depression and stress than anything else, I think -- being so poor that I can't even enjoy daily life without some sort of structure to keep me occupied. When I have a lot of money to spare (which isn't often, of course, but it's happened in the past), almost magically, I don't get depressed or stressed out.
Returning to teaching this week is just one of the many things I have to do as my life returns to normal; I have to get gas in the car this morning, for one. I went to Walmart last night to do my normal grocery shopping for necessities, and while I could've gotten gas then, I did said shopping at 5:30 PM when the gas station was swarming with busy people, and wasn't about to wait for ten minutes driving around in circles looking for a stall to open up. I'm also putting one of the fuel system cleaners/restorers (an $8 bottle of orange stuff) into the tank when I fill up this morning, too. Have to keep the car as ship-shape as possible, you know.
I also have to pay the rent this week, and mail it out around Thursday or so. This weekend I took out the trash and found a bag full of envelopes taped to my downstairs door from the landlord -- they've now changed their address and their corporation they used as the umbrella for all of their properties, and the envelopes had the new address and new information for it. They were also sweet enough to include a self-addressed stamped envelope for this month's rent, and with it an updated information sheet to fill out for all tenants' contact info and the like. I think that's pretty cool. I don't talk to my landlord much; I have only had to call him once in the past two years or so, and when he's in the neighborhood and around when I go outside to check the mail or when I'm mowing the grass or something, I always wave and the like. He and his wife, who also helps him manage the properties they own and rent out to tenants, and really, really nice and helpful people.
I get paid again on Friday, which is good because I have that aforementioned rent to pay, and I'll probably get my electric bill today or tomorrow. I don't think it'll be as high as it was last month, obviously, as I've only had to run the furnace about 1/3 as much, but I still doubt it will be incredibly cheap. I probably have enough money in my bank account right now to cover both, though it would leave me with little left. This is another reason why I'm waiting on my tax refunds to come in soon. I also got my insurance cards in the mail for my dental coverage and something else from the state for insurance, but I haven't opened that stuff yet -- I'll look at it tomorrow, as I'll be working all day today and don't have time to mess with it yet.
Speaking of tax refunds, Daisy is going to call about a few apartments she's found this morning when she gets off work. If she can find something soon, the majority of the tax refunds I get (that won't be used for bills and other living expenses in the here and now) will basically be given to her to help pay the first and/or second month's rent and deposit on our new place. As much as I'd like to save some of that money to funnel it into the wedding costs and/or living costs for after the wedding is over, most of it is probably going to go into that. I've told her that before we can actually get an accurate budget on how much money we'll need to survive on a monthly basis after we're married, we have to first find a place to live. Everything is pure speculation until we have a place to live and know how much it's going to cost to live there every month for rent, and then we can budget what's left for everything else.
This considerably stresses her out, of course, and for good reason -- a lot of it is, for the moment, totally on her. I can help out by helping to look for places online and by applying for jobs up there (remember, I applied for several over this weekend, and Mama sent me two more last night that I need to look at and apply for if possible), but the fact remains that she's there and I'm not. It's up to her to pick a place that's do-able for us on our current budget and do the paperwork for it to secure it, and I can't do those things since I am here and not there. It's a really stressful, really shitty situation, and for a lot of it my hands are tied. I don't even (currently) have any extra money to help her out on it, either. Every month is me covering basic necessities and paying bills just to survive here and not up there yet.
My classes today will both be long, and neither of them will be that much fun. I'm covering two readings and collecting workshop copies in my 102 class (as well as giving back journals) and in my 011 class tonight, I'm covering another reading and a chapter in the textbook. I only expect about half of the 011 class to show up, to be honest with you.
Yesterday I made out the lesson plans for the final assignments in the 102 course as we wrap up the rest of the semester. They'll be doing a Proposal and Annotated Bibliography, and then they'll be meeting with me for conferences and spending the rest of their semester writing their big, long research argument papers. Their final exam is set for Thursday, May 1 -- as I can set and schedule my own times for exams for classes that meet on the West campus (and I do). I've already told the West campus staff about this as well, so that nothing will be scheduled in that room at my exam time (well, nothing is anyway, nothing but my own class). Tomorrow in my 210 class, my students are bringing in drafts of their own project proposals and we're going through them in peer review -- and I'm also covering the other half of their final project in the workbook and in the student example. Thursday in my 102 class is workshop day. So, I have a decently busy week ahead of me.
Last night I switched out my bag for the remainder of the semester; I have always carried a sling bag, a messenger bag, to keep all of my student stuff in -- I believe it was one of my longtime ex's bags that she left behind when we broke up and she moved out -- and it's easily ten years old. Daisy's parents got her a new messenger bag (as she uses one for her purse anyway) but it wasn't big enough for her and wasn't her style, or something like that, so she gave it to me. It's tan and old-school, hipsterish, with faux-leather straps/snaps and buckles. It's a little smaller than my old bag, but I like it. A lot. So that's what I'm going to use for the rest of the semester.
It's cold this morning -- barely above freezing -- and it's only supposed to reach 50 or so by the end of the day. It's supposed to get progressively warmer for the rest of the week, but rain off and on and be windy. I guess this means we are, finally, getting a bit of springlike weather here in Kansas, as spring does tend to have a few "rainy weeks" in the 50s and 60s before it gets warm again. Oh well -- at least it's not snow. My mother told me yesterday that it's snowing (again) back home, and it flurried a little bit here yesterday afternoon. It was dark and dreary here all day yesterday, a trend that looks to continue today.
On that note, I shall gather my things to leave the house this morning, knowing full well that it will be at least twelve hours before I return. I do have something to look forward to, however -- my tuxedo t-shirt for the wedding should arrive today while I'm gone, and that will be fun to unbox this evening when I get home. I'll probably take pictures of it as well.
So today I return to my job, the status quo, back to normal teaching and sleeping schedules for the foreseeable future. My Spring Break ended last night, and from this point forward it's the proverbial mad rush to the end of the semester.
Don't get me wrong; I don't necessarily want to return to teaching this week and for the next seven or so weeks total, but I do like my job and I do like the routine of it. When I'm given a lot of unstructured time (such as on breaks between semesters), I tend to get depressed, usually because I have all the time in the world to do whatever I want or need to do, but because I'm not working during that time, I don't have the money to do anything. That's what causes more of my depression and stress than anything else, I think -- being so poor that I can't even enjoy daily life without some sort of structure to keep me occupied. When I have a lot of money to spare (which isn't often, of course, but it's happened in the past), almost magically, I don't get depressed or stressed out.
Returning to teaching this week is just one of the many things I have to do as my life returns to normal; I have to get gas in the car this morning, for one. I went to Walmart last night to do my normal grocery shopping for necessities, and while I could've gotten gas then, I did said shopping at 5:30 PM when the gas station was swarming with busy people, and wasn't about to wait for ten minutes driving around in circles looking for a stall to open up. I'm also putting one of the fuel system cleaners/restorers (an $8 bottle of orange stuff) into the tank when I fill up this morning, too. Have to keep the car as ship-shape as possible, you know.
I also have to pay the rent this week, and mail it out around Thursday or so. This weekend I took out the trash and found a bag full of envelopes taped to my downstairs door from the landlord -- they've now changed their address and their corporation they used as the umbrella for all of their properties, and the envelopes had the new address and new information for it. They were also sweet enough to include a self-addressed stamped envelope for this month's rent, and with it an updated information sheet to fill out for all tenants' contact info and the like. I think that's pretty cool. I don't talk to my landlord much; I have only had to call him once in the past two years or so, and when he's in the neighborhood and around when I go outside to check the mail or when I'm mowing the grass or something, I always wave and the like. He and his wife, who also helps him manage the properties they own and rent out to tenants, and really, really nice and helpful people.
I get paid again on Friday, which is good because I have that aforementioned rent to pay, and I'll probably get my electric bill today or tomorrow. I don't think it'll be as high as it was last month, obviously, as I've only had to run the furnace about 1/3 as much, but I still doubt it will be incredibly cheap. I probably have enough money in my bank account right now to cover both, though it would leave me with little left. This is another reason why I'm waiting on my tax refunds to come in soon. I also got my insurance cards in the mail for my dental coverage and something else from the state for insurance, but I haven't opened that stuff yet -- I'll look at it tomorrow, as I'll be working all day today and don't have time to mess with it yet.
Speaking of tax refunds, Daisy is going to call about a few apartments she's found this morning when she gets off work. If she can find something soon, the majority of the tax refunds I get (that won't be used for bills and other living expenses in the here and now) will basically be given to her to help pay the first and/or second month's rent and deposit on our new place. As much as I'd like to save some of that money to funnel it into the wedding costs and/or living costs for after the wedding is over, most of it is probably going to go into that. I've told her that before we can actually get an accurate budget on how much money we'll need to survive on a monthly basis after we're married, we have to first find a place to live. Everything is pure speculation until we have a place to live and know how much it's going to cost to live there every month for rent, and then we can budget what's left for everything else.
This considerably stresses her out, of course, and for good reason -- a lot of it is, for the moment, totally on her. I can help out by helping to look for places online and by applying for jobs up there (remember, I applied for several over this weekend, and Mama sent me two more last night that I need to look at and apply for if possible), but the fact remains that she's there and I'm not. It's up to her to pick a place that's do-able for us on our current budget and do the paperwork for it to secure it, and I can't do those things since I am here and not there. It's a really stressful, really shitty situation, and for a lot of it my hands are tied. I don't even (currently) have any extra money to help her out on it, either. Every month is me covering basic necessities and paying bills just to survive here and not up there yet.
My classes today will both be long, and neither of them will be that much fun. I'm covering two readings and collecting workshop copies in my 102 class (as well as giving back journals) and in my 011 class tonight, I'm covering another reading and a chapter in the textbook. I only expect about half of the 011 class to show up, to be honest with you.
Yesterday I made out the lesson plans for the final assignments in the 102 course as we wrap up the rest of the semester. They'll be doing a Proposal and Annotated Bibliography, and then they'll be meeting with me for conferences and spending the rest of their semester writing their big, long research argument papers. Their final exam is set for Thursday, May 1 -- as I can set and schedule my own times for exams for classes that meet on the West campus (and I do). I've already told the West campus staff about this as well, so that nothing will be scheduled in that room at my exam time (well, nothing is anyway, nothing but my own class). Tomorrow in my 210 class, my students are bringing in drafts of their own project proposals and we're going through them in peer review -- and I'm also covering the other half of their final project in the workbook and in the student example. Thursday in my 102 class is workshop day. So, I have a decently busy week ahead of me.
Last night I switched out my bag for the remainder of the semester; I have always carried a sling bag, a messenger bag, to keep all of my student stuff in -- I believe it was one of my longtime ex's bags that she left behind when we broke up and she moved out -- and it's easily ten years old. Daisy's parents got her a new messenger bag (as she uses one for her purse anyway) but it wasn't big enough for her and wasn't her style, or something like that, so she gave it to me. It's tan and old-school, hipsterish, with faux-leather straps/snaps and buckles. It's a little smaller than my old bag, but I like it. A lot. So that's what I'm going to use for the rest of the semester.
It's cold this morning -- barely above freezing -- and it's only supposed to reach 50 or so by the end of the day. It's supposed to get progressively warmer for the rest of the week, but rain off and on and be windy. I guess this means we are, finally, getting a bit of springlike weather here in Kansas, as spring does tend to have a few "rainy weeks" in the 50s and 60s before it gets warm again. Oh well -- at least it's not snow. My mother told me yesterday that it's snowing (again) back home, and it flurried a little bit here yesterday afternoon. It was dark and dreary here all day yesterday, a trend that looks to continue today.
On that note, I shall gather my things to leave the house this morning, knowing full well that it will be at least twelve hours before I return. I do have something to look forward to, however -- my tuxedo t-shirt for the wedding should arrive today while I'm gone, and that will be fun to unbox this evening when I get home. I'll probably take pictures of it as well.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
There's No Place Like Home, Part II
My Spring Break: day nine
As my break winds down into its last two days or so, I'm beginning to steel myself and prepare myself for a return to the normal routine of teaching/eating/showering/sleeping for the rest of the semester. This afternoon, I attempted to get back into that mindset a little more, and sent out emails to my students (who I haven't contacted in over a week, mind you, since we've been on break) reminding them what we're doing next week -- lest they ignore the fact that they're college students and let all of their work go to shit in my classes. I'll sketch out my normal lesson plans tomorrow or Monday, more than likely, and review the lessons I'm going to cover in my classes between now and when I get back on campus in order to refresh myself.
Ironically, it was warmer (and nicer), at least most of the time, in Omaha when I was there than it is and has been here in Kansas. Today, the high barely reached 50 and struggled to get there. It's going to dip down way into the 20s again tonight, and most of this coming week it's going to be chilly as well, with highs mostly in the 40s. It's almost April; normally, by this time, I've been wearing shorts every day for a good two weeks or so, and I've normally put away most of my shoes in favor of sandals. I'm absolutely itching to switch out my wardrobes from winter to summer clothing, if only because I'll need to pack a lot of those clothes up for the move anyway. I planned to do a good chunk of that wardrobe switch over this weekend, since I figured that it would be warm enough to do so, but it doesn't appear as if that's going to be the case. I'll more than likely have to put it off until next weekend, by which time the temperatures are supposed to be in the 70s again (and will hopefully stay there). On the plus side, as it's not been too incredibly cold as of late, I haven't had to run the furnace nearly at all -- which means my electric bill will/should be much lower this month than it has been. Hopefully, anyway. I still run it when it needs to run, obviously -- but it's not a "constantly on" scenario as it was, say, last month, when the high temperatures were barely above the single digits almost every day. It felt very, very nice to be able to wear shorts two of the three days I was in Omaha; I desperately want that every day. Soon.
There are some little things around the house that I have to do for the remainder of my weekend, though most of my tasks are already done. I already paid the two bills I had, I already did almost all of the laundry I needed to do, and I cleaned the cat room and gave them new food, litter, and water. I cooked a meal of very rich gnocchi and sauce last night, and still have half a bowl of it left for tonight's dinner (whenever I choose to eat, that is). I don't need to do any shopping until at least Wednesday night, if not Thursday afternoon when I'm done teaching for the week. Even my two smaller credit cards, the ones I get most of my gas and other small purchases with, are almost paid off -- I should be able to pay them off completely in another month or two at the most.
This is a good thing, as one of the big discussion topics Daisy and I went through while we were together is how we're planning for our survival after the wedding, when I will be unemployed after the semester ends (at least for some time, more than likely, and the shorter the better).
I've mentioned before that I don't have a whole lot of hope for the university to come through in the next few weeks and tell me "hey, we're all greenlighted here, so here's your new $40k-a-year position with us if you want it, and a guaranteed paycheck/some duties/work for the summer." Because (apparently) the chances for that now happening are almost slim to none, it is almost a certainty that we will be living and working in Omaha or the surrounding area after the wedding. And that means Daisy and I need to do some budgeting and financing to see just what the hell we are going to do to be able to survive.
I've been in this scenario before, of course, several times. It is not a pleasant one. It is not a fun one. I know how this game is played, and more often than not, I lose at it.
Being unemployed is not "fun." It is not "good," it is not "a passable existence." No, me being unemployed for any length of time is a bad, bad thing when I have bills to pay and no safety net of savings because I'm not paid enough to have anything to save. And my employment with the university -- whether I like it or not, or have another job or not -- ends on May 16. That's the last day of finals week and the end of the semester. I believe I'll receive my last paycheck a week later, and it'll be done. Whatever money I have left after May 16 is all I'll have until I get another job somewhere -- but I can assure you it's not going to be enough to live on, move out of this place with, and survive on until that next job comes around...unless I start that next job on May 17.
As ungodly, terrible stressful as it is to realize that, I can't exactly focus on it right now. Again, like it or not, until that last day, I still have a job to do that requires my attention and energy, I still have a wedding coming up, and I can only help devise strategies for survival in the meantime and in my downtime. Also, again, I'm not in Omaha, so I can do little to help Daisy out in her own planning of things both for and after the wedding.
Planning of what, you may ask?
I mentioned before that Daisy wants to have a place for us, ready to go and move into, by the time the semester ends -- if not shortly beforehand -- so that we can use it as a base of operations leading up to the end of the semester, leading up to the wedding, and after the wedding we can take the time necessary to pack up my house here, clean it, and make the big move north. Yes, it will be a slow process, as I have a lot of stuff to pack, a lot of stuff to trash and/or donate to charity, and I have to disconnect and close down all of the utilities and the like which are in my name here -- as I've lived here for five years. I also can't up-and-leave just like that anyhow -- I have to give 30 days' notice to my landlord when I'm ready to move. All of this is a lot of work, and it's not going to be done overnight -- it will likely take several weeks, during which we'll both have to split our time between both residences in order to get it all accomplished and taken care of.
Finding a place is not as easy as it sounds -- most places Daisy and I have looked at online in our searches aren't anywhere near as inexpensive as my house here is now, and she's looking at apartments and the like -- this is a house, and the apartments she's found are easily $200-300 more a month just for the rent, not to mention utilities and other necessities we'll need for survival. And, sadly, that's not even in the nice parts of Omaha. It's about the same in the suburbs around the city as well. We can't afford that when I'm going to be unemployed for at least a little while after the semester ends.
Even more frustrating is the pet policy on some places -- no matter what, I'm not getting rid of the cats. Ever. The cats are my/our children; wherever I/we go or end up, they go too. There are some things I can sacrifice or live without in whatever place we move into, especially if said place is going to be temporary anyway until we can get a house. The cats are not one of those things. They will always be with me until they get old and die.
Finding jobs that will sustain us is just as difficult as finding a place to live. While yes, I have a lot of experience in a very specified, very competitive field (teaching English at the college level), that doesn't mean much. I would, of course, like to stay in academia -- especially if said academic job actually paid me a living wage and gave me some sort of benefits -- the chances of that actually happening and giving us enough money to actually live on is very slim...especially in the summer, when most colleges and universities aren't in session and/or are in very limited sessions. While I doubt I'd have any problems finding a teaching position at a college or university up there for the fall, if I could and wanted to continue doing that (which I would, if possible) that doesn't help me/us from May to August. I have applied for administrative/advising positions at different colleges up there before, however, and if the situation is looking particularly dire, I will contact the chairs of those colleges/universities' English Departments directly and will ask them for adjunct/lecturer positions -- which, of course, they won't advertise most of the time on job boards or their own websites.
Daisy, yes, is looking for jobs for not only her, but for both of us, and has been applying for new jobs herself so that she can possibly get a new, much-higher-paying position before the wedding and we won't have to worry about this as much, but as of right now, we're still planning for the worst case scenario: me being unemployed after May (for a time) and her still working the job she has now if she can't find anything else. Both of us can, theoretically, do a lot of things, but that doesn't help us if we can't get hired anyplace no matter how many applications we send out. So, we're hoping for the best, but we're absolutely planning for and are trying to ready ourselves for the worst.
"Well, what bills will you have?" she asked me as we were driving home on Thursday night. "Personally, I mean. You don't have a cell phone bill, and you won't have rent/utilities in your name to pay every month once you move up here, so what does that leave?"
"Credit cards," I said. "And my car insurance every six months."
"When does your car insurance come due again?"
"At the end of June. It's about $300, give or take. Could be more, could be less. I updated my policy at the beginning of the year, as they asked me to and because my working/driving situations changed. I was listed as a full-time student before, and now I'm not. I was also driving five days a week before, and now I'm not, and they base at least some of the rates on mileage or expected mileage and student/non-student status. It could go up or down now, based on what I'm now eligible or ineligible for."
I believe my last car insurance payment, in December, was $270-something. I always put it on my Citi Card and pay it off that way anyhow. It hasn't changed a whole lot since I got my policy in 2011.
"And the credit cards?"
"I should have the smaller ones paid off or mostly paid off before the wedding and the move," I said. "I've been paying $100 on each of them every month when their minimum payments are $20 and $25. But the Discover card I've been using to live on, basically -- to get groceries and the like so that I have money in my bank account with which to pay my bills -- and that card has about $1500 on it right now."
I pay $100 a month at least on the Discover card as well, even though its minimum payment is $35. It doesn't matter -- even though I pay $100 on it, I use it for about $200 every month (or more) for groceries, so the balance never really lessens by that much, if at all, between payments. It just keeps it at a mostly even keel and slows my slow bleeding of money.
"Look," I said, "if I have to, I have no qualms about applying for a shitty retail job again to kill time and bring in at least some money to help out our financial situation this summer, even if I'd only work that job for like three months. I can work at Walmart or the Dollar Tree or fast food or someplace like that if I have to. I'll fucking hate it, but if it's the difference between us being able to live and us not being able to live, of course I'll do it."
Obviously, we're both hoping that doesn't have to happen, but again -- plan for the worst, folks.
On rough calculations, not even taking into account the cost of food or gas, it's going to be about $2k a month just to survive in Omaha. That includes rent and utilities, and being able to pay the bills we have that aren't going away anytime soon, if ever (Daisy's car payment/insurance, her cell phone bill, our credit cards, etc). Not to mention that we'll have to pay for moving expenses and everything else involved when two people get married and/or move, such as switching over my driver's license (and registration of my car) to Nebraska, her new license/name change/passport and the like, and getting the cats licensed/vet visits for them in Nebraska. Add in food for us and the cats, and gas for our cars, and any other expenses that can and will pop up, and it's looking more like $3k a month for survival expenses only, or close to it. If we don't have a combined household income of $36k a year after taxes -- meaning, take-home pay, it's going to be rough. And that's not only the bare minimum, but a fairly tall order unless we both get decently-paying jobs rather quickly, or unless she keeps the one she has now and I get a comparably-salaried one.
I will remind you folks that even when I worked at a grocery store full time, 40 hours a week, I only cleared $17k a year. That's the most money I've ever made in a year. I am used to living in poverty. I am used to "going without" because I can't afford things, and I am used to not spending money and penny-pinching, fighting tooth-and-nail for everything I have. Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time knows that I barely scrape by most months -- I don't make that a secret, and I am brutally honest and candid about how hard it can be sometimes. Yet, I don't ask for pity, and I don't ask for handouts or sympathy from anyone. I won't ask for help unless it is supremely, absolutely necessary, and those who have helped me in the past when I've been under financial hardship (like my parents), I have paid back as soon as I could. Daisy has helped me when I needed it and when she could, but she was not obligated to and didn't want me to pay her back. I get by, and that's all that matters. But, in the coming months, simply "getting by" is going to become a lot more difficult when it comes to the latter half of this year after the wedding.
To those ends, I have been proactive as much as I can be given the timeframe. Tonight I applied for several positions, including teaching positions, in Omaha. I can do all of them well, and all of them (with, maybe, the exception of the teaching position) pay much more than I'm making right now. This is going to be a continuing trend over the course of the next several weeks and/or months, in hopes that I can find something to help sustain and stabilize us after the wedding.
As of right now, the costs of the wedding and everything for the wedding are nowhere near as high as I feared they would be -- we have been extremely budget-conscious and creative in our methods, and have spent much less than I was expecting us to spend -- and that includes the venue, upcoming catering expenses, my jacket, and most (if not all) of the decorations. Because of that, if we wanted to or could, our entire wedding expenses including everything, could be paid off/paid for by nothing but our combined tax refunds alone and we'd still have some left over. Obviously, we can't do that (Daisy got her tax refunds a long time ago and applied most of them to the wedding costs anyway, and mine haven't arrived yet -- but they'll need to go to living expenses), but use that as a frame of reference, if you will. As 95% of the wedding planning and structure has been done by Daisy herself, I am incredibly proud of her for her financial and budgeting skills.
I got the stack of invitations to hand-deliver to my friends and colleagues in the department when I get back to campus on Tuesday, and sent out messages to the group of people I know are coming about hotel/flight/other travel info this afternoon. I have at least four or five people who will be flying in, and at least two of them are in the wedding (April and my brother; Rae's in the wedding too, but I don't know if she'll fly or drive), so this is rather pertinent info for them to have. I'm not in charge of their travel plans, flights, or hotel rooms -- that's all on them. All I can do is tell them when stuff is happening and how, and let them sort it out. I sent an email to my parents as well, giving them the rough schedule so that they can plan for their trip a few months in advance, since they're driving from West Virginia.
The other reason that I'm giving my parents a few months' worth of advance notice is that they not only have three cats to board while they'll be away, but they now have another dog -- they got a golden retriever puppy last month, and they'll have to make plans to board said dog as well (since having the dog at the wedding, or around a lot of the people there, would kill about half of Daisy's family due to pet hair/dander allergies). I've told them this, of course. Daisy may still be allergic to dogs as well -- I doesn't know, because she stays far away from them anyway as most of her family is so allergic.
As for our future living situation, well...
Look, it's a stressful time right now for all of us. I'm going to be really busy from now through at least the first two and a half weeks of May. The wedding is several weeks after that -- I'm not going to say when here on the blog, of course, but suffice it to say, we both have a lot of shit to do before said wedding, and almost none of it has anything to do with the wedding. We need to be able to find jobs to survive the summer, obviously -- me more than her, as she has her decently-paying job now -- and she/we have to find a place to live. Neither of these are easy tasks, and the latter really isn't easy given the timeframes we're working with.
I am put into a really hard, really stressful position here -- I've lived in my home for five years, and have accumulated not only a lot of possessions, but a lot of things that must be cleaned/scrubbed down and other things that need to be simply thrown away or donated to charity. I have utilities that must be disconnected and/or discontinued. I have cats I have to provide for and have to find a safe way to relocate as well. And, more than anything else, I have to give thirty days' notice to my landlord before I can move, and I still have to pay my rent for those thirty days. All of these things take time, and we're operating on a very limited timeframe. Also, unlike Daisy, I live alone -- it really is just me and the cats. I don't have family around me (or in the same house with me, like she does), and I don't have friends here in Newton who would be a five-minute drive away, friends who could help me move or clean when I need that help. Most of my friends will vacate town before the wedding, as the semester will be over, and the ones who won't aren't exactly close by or relative next-door-neighbors -- they're at least a half-hour away. Most, if not all of my packing, cleaning, and readying the house to move out is going to be done all by me, myself, and I.
The actual moving -- as in, loading boxes and furniture onto a rented truck and driving said truck to Omaha -- will be done in the span of a day or two, and won't be pleasant at all. I don't even know how we're going to do it or be able to afford to do it. Moving here from Missouri wasn't cheap, and that was with a massive rented box truck and three people to load it up/drive it here/unpack it and drive it back. Omaha is farther away, and neither of us know how to drive a truck like that effectively, let alone have the money to rent one. I'd much rather hire a moving crew to do it, but that would be even more expensive -- expensive for money we absolutely do not have. But would it be worth it?
A moving crew could be in and out within a day. They could load the shit into the truck, drive said truck to Omaha, and unload it quickly, without the need to spend a day or more exhausting ourselves and moving things on and off the truck, out of this house, driving to Omaha, unloading the stuff again, and moving it all into the new place. I don't know how often you folks have moved in the past, but let me tell you -- over the course of the almost eight years I've lived in the midwest, I've moved five times:
1. West Virginia to Missouri
2. Missouri house 1 to Missouri apartment 1
3. Missouri apartment 1 to Missouri apartment 2
4. Missouri apartment 2 back to Missouri house 1
5. Missouri house to Kansas house here.
Those first four moves were within the span of a little more than three years total, too. Yeah. It wasn't pleasant. It got harder every time. This will be the hardest, most back-breaking move yet: five years' worth of stuff crammed into this house, and the second-longest move/drive of my life, with less help. I'm already packing stuff up and throwing useless shit away. Tonight I packed six boxes full of dishes, coffee mugs, and glassware that I won't use before I move, padding them all really well, and now the only dishes in my cupboard are the ones I will use between now and my move. I'll do the same with my pots and pans when I get bigger boxes for them. I also got a big sack ready for clothing and other items to donate to charity. I need to pare down my clothing by a lot anyway, as I did just get like 30 new pairs of pants/shorts from Daisy's father. What I don't want and/or don't wear will go to charity; I need to create a more minimalist lifestyle for myself, and it starts from the ground up.
Anyway. We're trying to figure out what to do for the move and when. It led to a fairly long-form (though mostly calm) argument between us tonight, and it boiled down to the fact that Daisy wants us to operate on a very fast, very hard-charging timeframe for the wedding and the move, and while I am not opposed to this, I am realistic and experienced in moving when she is not, and I know how long some things take to do when shoved in with all other tasks that must be done (like teaching my classes, grading, finals week, sleeping, the wedding, and anything/everything else). I can't call and disconnect my utilities and change my addresses and the like until everything is set up at our new place, whenever/wherever that will be, because until then I'll still be living here, and I'll still have all of my stuff here. We can discuss all the timeframes, routes of those timeframes, and plans of action within those timeframes until we're both blue in the face, but none of it matters until we get something set in stone -- namely, until we've found a place to move into and have it as our own. Until then, arguing hypotheticals is pointless.
As I haven't heard anything from the department or university, I'm taking that as a sign that "oh well, nothing's going to happen" and am basically moving on. My focus now is for a life with my wife in Omaha and everything that entails. I can't be selfish or live on wishful thinking anymore, obviously, as it's just not me that lifestyle is going to affect after the wedding. I expect Daisy to be with child before the end of the year, and I have to plan for the future, not simply live day-to-day in the present as I always have been living until now.
Anyway.
On Tuesday my world returns to normal, and I return to teaching my classes day-in, day-out for the rest of the semester. I don't necessarily look forward to it, but it does return me to a routine, and does tend to keep me busy enough to where I'm not constantly stressed out about everything else going on in life. My break is coming to an end, and with it, quite possibly the last "spring break" I'll ever have as a professor. It's a sobering thought -- people who work in the real world outside the bubble of academia don't get a random week off in the middle of March. But then again, they're also employed and get paychecks in the summer and over Christmas and New Year's, too.
As my break winds down into its last two days or so, I'm beginning to steel myself and prepare myself for a return to the normal routine of teaching/eating/showering/sleeping for the rest of the semester. This afternoon, I attempted to get back into that mindset a little more, and sent out emails to my students (who I haven't contacted in over a week, mind you, since we've been on break) reminding them what we're doing next week -- lest they ignore the fact that they're college students and let all of their work go to shit in my classes. I'll sketch out my normal lesson plans tomorrow or Monday, more than likely, and review the lessons I'm going to cover in my classes between now and when I get back on campus in order to refresh myself.
Ironically, it was warmer (and nicer), at least most of the time, in Omaha when I was there than it is and has been here in Kansas. Today, the high barely reached 50 and struggled to get there. It's going to dip down way into the 20s again tonight, and most of this coming week it's going to be chilly as well, with highs mostly in the 40s. It's almost April; normally, by this time, I've been wearing shorts every day for a good two weeks or so, and I've normally put away most of my shoes in favor of sandals. I'm absolutely itching to switch out my wardrobes from winter to summer clothing, if only because I'll need to pack a lot of those clothes up for the move anyway. I planned to do a good chunk of that wardrobe switch over this weekend, since I figured that it would be warm enough to do so, but it doesn't appear as if that's going to be the case. I'll more than likely have to put it off until next weekend, by which time the temperatures are supposed to be in the 70s again (and will hopefully stay there). On the plus side, as it's not been too incredibly cold as of late, I haven't had to run the furnace nearly at all -- which means my electric bill will/should be much lower this month than it has been. Hopefully, anyway. I still run it when it needs to run, obviously -- but it's not a "constantly on" scenario as it was, say, last month, when the high temperatures were barely above the single digits almost every day. It felt very, very nice to be able to wear shorts two of the three days I was in Omaha; I desperately want that every day. Soon.
There are some little things around the house that I have to do for the remainder of my weekend, though most of my tasks are already done. I already paid the two bills I had, I already did almost all of the laundry I needed to do, and I cleaned the cat room and gave them new food, litter, and water. I cooked a meal of very rich gnocchi and sauce last night, and still have half a bowl of it left for tonight's dinner (whenever I choose to eat, that is). I don't need to do any shopping until at least Wednesday night, if not Thursday afternoon when I'm done teaching for the week. Even my two smaller credit cards, the ones I get most of my gas and other small purchases with, are almost paid off -- I should be able to pay them off completely in another month or two at the most.
This is a good thing, as one of the big discussion topics Daisy and I went through while we were together is how we're planning for our survival after the wedding, when I will be unemployed after the semester ends (at least for some time, more than likely, and the shorter the better).
I've mentioned before that I don't have a whole lot of hope for the university to come through in the next few weeks and tell me "hey, we're all greenlighted here, so here's your new $40k-a-year position with us if you want it, and a guaranteed paycheck/some duties/work for the summer." Because (apparently) the chances for that now happening are almost slim to none, it is almost a certainty that we will be living and working in Omaha or the surrounding area after the wedding. And that means Daisy and I need to do some budgeting and financing to see just what the hell we are going to do to be able to survive.
I've been in this scenario before, of course, several times. It is not a pleasant one. It is not a fun one. I know how this game is played, and more often than not, I lose at it.
Being unemployed is not "fun." It is not "good," it is not "a passable existence." No, me being unemployed for any length of time is a bad, bad thing when I have bills to pay and no safety net of savings because I'm not paid enough to have anything to save. And my employment with the university -- whether I like it or not, or have another job or not -- ends on May 16. That's the last day of finals week and the end of the semester. I believe I'll receive my last paycheck a week later, and it'll be done. Whatever money I have left after May 16 is all I'll have until I get another job somewhere -- but I can assure you it's not going to be enough to live on, move out of this place with, and survive on until that next job comes around...unless I start that next job on May 17.
As ungodly, terrible stressful as it is to realize that, I can't exactly focus on it right now. Again, like it or not, until that last day, I still have a job to do that requires my attention and energy, I still have a wedding coming up, and I can only help devise strategies for survival in the meantime and in my downtime. Also, again, I'm not in Omaha, so I can do little to help Daisy out in her own planning of things both for and after the wedding.
Planning of what, you may ask?
I mentioned before that Daisy wants to have a place for us, ready to go and move into, by the time the semester ends -- if not shortly beforehand -- so that we can use it as a base of operations leading up to the end of the semester, leading up to the wedding, and after the wedding we can take the time necessary to pack up my house here, clean it, and make the big move north. Yes, it will be a slow process, as I have a lot of stuff to pack, a lot of stuff to trash and/or donate to charity, and I have to disconnect and close down all of the utilities and the like which are in my name here -- as I've lived here for five years. I also can't up-and-leave just like that anyhow -- I have to give 30 days' notice to my landlord when I'm ready to move. All of this is a lot of work, and it's not going to be done overnight -- it will likely take several weeks, during which we'll both have to split our time between both residences in order to get it all accomplished and taken care of.
Finding a place is not as easy as it sounds -- most places Daisy and I have looked at online in our searches aren't anywhere near as inexpensive as my house here is now, and she's looking at apartments and the like -- this is a house, and the apartments she's found are easily $200-300 more a month just for the rent, not to mention utilities and other necessities we'll need for survival. And, sadly, that's not even in the nice parts of Omaha. It's about the same in the suburbs around the city as well. We can't afford that when I'm going to be unemployed for at least a little while after the semester ends.
Even more frustrating is the pet policy on some places -- no matter what, I'm not getting rid of the cats. Ever. The cats are my/our children; wherever I/we go or end up, they go too. There are some things I can sacrifice or live without in whatever place we move into, especially if said place is going to be temporary anyway until we can get a house. The cats are not one of those things. They will always be with me until they get old and die.
Finding jobs that will sustain us is just as difficult as finding a place to live. While yes, I have a lot of experience in a very specified, very competitive field (teaching English at the college level), that doesn't mean much. I would, of course, like to stay in academia -- especially if said academic job actually paid me a living wage and gave me some sort of benefits -- the chances of that actually happening and giving us enough money to actually live on is very slim...especially in the summer, when most colleges and universities aren't in session and/or are in very limited sessions. While I doubt I'd have any problems finding a teaching position at a college or university up there for the fall, if I could and wanted to continue doing that (which I would, if possible) that doesn't help me/us from May to August. I have applied for administrative/advising positions at different colleges up there before, however, and if the situation is looking particularly dire, I will contact the chairs of those colleges/universities' English Departments directly and will ask them for adjunct/lecturer positions -- which, of course, they won't advertise most of the time on job boards or their own websites.
Daisy, yes, is looking for jobs for not only her, but for both of us, and has been applying for new jobs herself so that she can possibly get a new, much-higher-paying position before the wedding and we won't have to worry about this as much, but as of right now, we're still planning for the worst case scenario: me being unemployed after May (for a time) and her still working the job she has now if she can't find anything else. Both of us can, theoretically, do a lot of things, but that doesn't help us if we can't get hired anyplace no matter how many applications we send out. So, we're hoping for the best, but we're absolutely planning for and are trying to ready ourselves for the worst.
"Well, what bills will you have?" she asked me as we were driving home on Thursday night. "Personally, I mean. You don't have a cell phone bill, and you won't have rent/utilities in your name to pay every month once you move up here, so what does that leave?"
"Credit cards," I said. "And my car insurance every six months."
"When does your car insurance come due again?"
"At the end of June. It's about $300, give or take. Could be more, could be less. I updated my policy at the beginning of the year, as they asked me to and because my working/driving situations changed. I was listed as a full-time student before, and now I'm not. I was also driving five days a week before, and now I'm not, and they base at least some of the rates on mileage or expected mileage and student/non-student status. It could go up or down now, based on what I'm now eligible or ineligible for."
I believe my last car insurance payment, in December, was $270-something. I always put it on my Citi Card and pay it off that way anyhow. It hasn't changed a whole lot since I got my policy in 2011.
"And the credit cards?"
"I should have the smaller ones paid off or mostly paid off before the wedding and the move," I said. "I've been paying $100 on each of them every month when their minimum payments are $20 and $25. But the Discover card I've been using to live on, basically -- to get groceries and the like so that I have money in my bank account with which to pay my bills -- and that card has about $1500 on it right now."
I pay $100 a month at least on the Discover card as well, even though its minimum payment is $35. It doesn't matter -- even though I pay $100 on it, I use it for about $200 every month (or more) for groceries, so the balance never really lessens by that much, if at all, between payments. It just keeps it at a mostly even keel and slows my slow bleeding of money.
"Look," I said, "if I have to, I have no qualms about applying for a shitty retail job again to kill time and bring in at least some money to help out our financial situation this summer, even if I'd only work that job for like three months. I can work at Walmart or the Dollar Tree or fast food or someplace like that if I have to. I'll fucking hate it, but if it's the difference between us being able to live and us not being able to live, of course I'll do it."
Obviously, we're both hoping that doesn't have to happen, but again -- plan for the worst, folks.
On rough calculations, not even taking into account the cost of food or gas, it's going to be about $2k a month just to survive in Omaha. That includes rent and utilities, and being able to pay the bills we have that aren't going away anytime soon, if ever (Daisy's car payment/insurance, her cell phone bill, our credit cards, etc). Not to mention that we'll have to pay for moving expenses and everything else involved when two people get married and/or move, such as switching over my driver's license (and registration of my car) to Nebraska, her new license/name change/passport and the like, and getting the cats licensed/vet visits for them in Nebraska. Add in food for us and the cats, and gas for our cars, and any other expenses that can and will pop up, and it's looking more like $3k a month for survival expenses only, or close to it. If we don't have a combined household income of $36k a year after taxes -- meaning, take-home pay, it's going to be rough. And that's not only the bare minimum, but a fairly tall order unless we both get decently-paying jobs rather quickly, or unless she keeps the one she has now and I get a comparably-salaried one.
I will remind you folks that even when I worked at a grocery store full time, 40 hours a week, I only cleared $17k a year. That's the most money I've ever made in a year. I am used to living in poverty. I am used to "going without" because I can't afford things, and I am used to not spending money and penny-pinching, fighting tooth-and-nail for everything I have. Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time knows that I barely scrape by most months -- I don't make that a secret, and I am brutally honest and candid about how hard it can be sometimes. Yet, I don't ask for pity, and I don't ask for handouts or sympathy from anyone. I won't ask for help unless it is supremely, absolutely necessary, and those who have helped me in the past when I've been under financial hardship (like my parents), I have paid back as soon as I could. Daisy has helped me when I needed it and when she could, but she was not obligated to and didn't want me to pay her back. I get by, and that's all that matters. But, in the coming months, simply "getting by" is going to become a lot more difficult when it comes to the latter half of this year after the wedding.
To those ends, I have been proactive as much as I can be given the timeframe. Tonight I applied for several positions, including teaching positions, in Omaha. I can do all of them well, and all of them (with, maybe, the exception of the teaching position) pay much more than I'm making right now. This is going to be a continuing trend over the course of the next several weeks and/or months, in hopes that I can find something to help sustain and stabilize us after the wedding.
As of right now, the costs of the wedding and everything for the wedding are nowhere near as high as I feared they would be -- we have been extremely budget-conscious and creative in our methods, and have spent much less than I was expecting us to spend -- and that includes the venue, upcoming catering expenses, my jacket, and most (if not all) of the decorations. Because of that, if we wanted to or could, our entire wedding expenses including everything, could be paid off/paid for by nothing but our combined tax refunds alone and we'd still have some left over. Obviously, we can't do that (Daisy got her tax refunds a long time ago and applied most of them to the wedding costs anyway, and mine haven't arrived yet -- but they'll need to go to living expenses), but use that as a frame of reference, if you will. As 95% of the wedding planning and structure has been done by Daisy herself, I am incredibly proud of her for her financial and budgeting skills.
I got the stack of invitations to hand-deliver to my friends and colleagues in the department when I get back to campus on Tuesday, and sent out messages to the group of people I know are coming about hotel/flight/other travel info this afternoon. I have at least four or five people who will be flying in, and at least two of them are in the wedding (April and my brother; Rae's in the wedding too, but I don't know if she'll fly or drive), so this is rather pertinent info for them to have. I'm not in charge of their travel plans, flights, or hotel rooms -- that's all on them. All I can do is tell them when stuff is happening and how, and let them sort it out. I sent an email to my parents as well, giving them the rough schedule so that they can plan for their trip a few months in advance, since they're driving from West Virginia.
The other reason that I'm giving my parents a few months' worth of advance notice is that they not only have three cats to board while they'll be away, but they now have another dog -- they got a golden retriever puppy last month, and they'll have to make plans to board said dog as well (since having the dog at the wedding, or around a lot of the people there, would kill about half of Daisy's family due to pet hair/dander allergies). I've told them this, of course. Daisy may still be allergic to dogs as well -- I doesn't know, because she stays far away from them anyway as most of her family is so allergic.
As for our future living situation, well...
Look, it's a stressful time right now for all of us. I'm going to be really busy from now through at least the first two and a half weeks of May. The wedding is several weeks after that -- I'm not going to say when here on the blog, of course, but suffice it to say, we both have a lot of shit to do before said wedding, and almost none of it has anything to do with the wedding. We need to be able to find jobs to survive the summer, obviously -- me more than her, as she has her decently-paying job now -- and she/we have to find a place to live. Neither of these are easy tasks, and the latter really isn't easy given the timeframes we're working with.
I am put into a really hard, really stressful position here -- I've lived in my home for five years, and have accumulated not only a lot of possessions, but a lot of things that must be cleaned/scrubbed down and other things that need to be simply thrown away or donated to charity. I have utilities that must be disconnected and/or discontinued. I have cats I have to provide for and have to find a safe way to relocate as well. And, more than anything else, I have to give thirty days' notice to my landlord before I can move, and I still have to pay my rent for those thirty days. All of these things take time, and we're operating on a very limited timeframe. Also, unlike Daisy, I live alone -- it really is just me and the cats. I don't have family around me (or in the same house with me, like she does), and I don't have friends here in Newton who would be a five-minute drive away, friends who could help me move or clean when I need that help. Most of my friends will vacate town before the wedding, as the semester will be over, and the ones who won't aren't exactly close by or relative next-door-neighbors -- they're at least a half-hour away. Most, if not all of my packing, cleaning, and readying the house to move out is going to be done all by me, myself, and I.
The actual moving -- as in, loading boxes and furniture onto a rented truck and driving said truck to Omaha -- will be done in the span of a day or two, and won't be pleasant at all. I don't even know how we're going to do it or be able to afford to do it. Moving here from Missouri wasn't cheap, and that was with a massive rented box truck and three people to load it up/drive it here/unpack it and drive it back. Omaha is farther away, and neither of us know how to drive a truck like that effectively, let alone have the money to rent one. I'd much rather hire a moving crew to do it, but that would be even more expensive -- expensive for money we absolutely do not have. But would it be worth it?
A moving crew could be in and out within a day. They could load the shit into the truck, drive said truck to Omaha, and unload it quickly, without the need to spend a day or more exhausting ourselves and moving things on and off the truck, out of this house, driving to Omaha, unloading the stuff again, and moving it all into the new place. I don't know how often you folks have moved in the past, but let me tell you -- over the course of the almost eight years I've lived in the midwest, I've moved five times:
1. West Virginia to Missouri
2. Missouri house 1 to Missouri apartment 1
3. Missouri apartment 1 to Missouri apartment 2
4. Missouri apartment 2 back to Missouri house 1
5. Missouri house to Kansas house here.
Those first four moves were within the span of a little more than three years total, too. Yeah. It wasn't pleasant. It got harder every time. This will be the hardest, most back-breaking move yet: five years' worth of stuff crammed into this house, and the second-longest move/drive of my life, with less help. I'm already packing stuff up and throwing useless shit away. Tonight I packed six boxes full of dishes, coffee mugs, and glassware that I won't use before I move, padding them all really well, and now the only dishes in my cupboard are the ones I will use between now and my move. I'll do the same with my pots and pans when I get bigger boxes for them. I also got a big sack ready for clothing and other items to donate to charity. I need to pare down my clothing by a lot anyway, as I did just get like 30 new pairs of pants/shorts from Daisy's father. What I don't want and/or don't wear will go to charity; I need to create a more minimalist lifestyle for myself, and it starts from the ground up.
Anyway. We're trying to figure out what to do for the move and when. It led to a fairly long-form (though mostly calm) argument between us tonight, and it boiled down to the fact that Daisy wants us to operate on a very fast, very hard-charging timeframe for the wedding and the move, and while I am not opposed to this, I am realistic and experienced in moving when she is not, and I know how long some things take to do when shoved in with all other tasks that must be done (like teaching my classes, grading, finals week, sleeping, the wedding, and anything/everything else). I can't call and disconnect my utilities and change my addresses and the like until everything is set up at our new place, whenever/wherever that will be, because until then I'll still be living here, and I'll still have all of my stuff here. We can discuss all the timeframes, routes of those timeframes, and plans of action within those timeframes until we're both blue in the face, but none of it matters until we get something set in stone -- namely, until we've found a place to move into and have it as our own. Until then, arguing hypotheticals is pointless.
As I haven't heard anything from the department or university, I'm taking that as a sign that "oh well, nothing's going to happen" and am basically moving on. My focus now is for a life with my wife in Omaha and everything that entails. I can't be selfish or live on wishful thinking anymore, obviously, as it's just not me that lifestyle is going to affect after the wedding. I expect Daisy to be with child before the end of the year, and I have to plan for the future, not simply live day-to-day in the present as I always have been living until now.
Anyway.
On Tuesday my world returns to normal, and I return to teaching my classes day-in, day-out for the rest of the semester. I don't necessarily look forward to it, but it does return me to a routine, and does tend to keep me busy enough to where I'm not constantly stressed out about everything else going on in life. My break is coming to an end, and with it, quite possibly the last "spring break" I'll ever have as a professor. It's a sobering thought -- people who work in the real world outside the bubble of academia don't get a random week off in the middle of March. But then again, they're also employed and get paychecks in the summer and over Christmas and New Year's, too.
Friday, March 21, 2014
There's No Place Like Home, Part I
Spring semester: day forty-four
My Spring Break: day eight
I have returned safely to Kansas after our trip to Omaha, and Daisy just left to go back home a little over an hour ago, as she works tonight. Now begins the time of the great decompression, the winding-down of a long break and a trip that, while fun, was quite tiring, and at times, moderately stressful. We returned last night in the overnight hours, and arrived this morning around 5AM. She drove us to York, and I took us the rest of the way -- over 200 miles, as I kept an eye on the trip meter in her car. When we got here, we put everything away that needed to be put away, I made something to eat, and then she went to bed. I showered and followed about an hour later. I got up around 1; she got up a little after 2. I made her waffles for breakfast, and then she left for home.
The trip was long and mostly busy, especially when coupled with the fact that both of us were off our sleep schedules. I'm still off mine, obviously -- a good chunk of my weekend will be spent playing catch-up on sleep, and taking care of stuff around the house that needs to be done in the meantime, since I've been gone for most of the week -- like the several piles of cat vomit which have manifested because the cats still don't know how to eat when I'm gone, so they gorge themselves and then puke. Over and over. I have to do all of my laundry from the trip, I have two new bills that have come in over the course of the past several days (cable and Discover card bill), I have to re-clean the cat room, etc.
Right now, of course, I'm relatively low on energy. That's why I mentioned "the great decompression" above, because that's what I'll be doing over the next day or so at least -- decompressing, winding down, returning to my normal routines and trying to get back into the groove of being alone here again with the cats and my solitude.
"Do you think I'll get to see you again between now and the end of the semester?" Daisy asked me this morning, in reference to the fact that it's not incredibly far off, but also because my class schedule resumes as per the normal again on Tuesday with no other breaks from now through mid-May.
"It depends on whether we both have time, babe," I said. "My classes resume Tuesday, and my schedule goes back to normal teaching again. It depends on if you have time to take off and/or can make time to come down with all of the wedding stuff coming up."
Of course, I'm always happy to see Daisy and have her around; even if I have a busy week ahead of me, I can always plan a few days ahead, at least, to re-order the stuff I have to do (such as grading and lesson planning) to maximize our time together. I had three stacks of papers and a stack of journals to grade through before I left for Omaha, and I did all of those at once last weekend so that I wouldn't have them hanging over my head or be bogged down by them upon my return home this weekend. I did my taxes last weekend so that I wouldn't have to worry about those, either. I took care of everything I could take care of and cleared a big swath of time for us, is what I'm saying -- and I don't expect to find myself much busier than that at any given time for the rest of the semester, so I could do it again.
We did a lot over the trip up there in the short timeframe we had to do it. Rather than give you a detailed day-by-day rundown as I usually do (because, again, I'm tired) I'll hit the big beats and will go into detail on the ones that deserve a little further explanation and/or attention:
1. I now have a jacket for the wedding (or I will, once it arrives).
2. I also now have all of the invitations to give out to my friends/colleagues.
3. I got a new messenger bag (courtesy of Daisy's parents).
4. Daisy got me a vaping starter kit.
5. It snowed like hell on Tuesday night and had melted off by Wednesday afternoon.
6. We went to see Mr. Peabody and Sherman.
7. We had Night Flight Pizza and met up with a group of friends at Crystal Jade.
8. We began seriously discussing job and relocation plans for after the wedding.
Those are all of the big beats to hit, anyhow.
When we left here on Monday night, I was incredibly tired and strung out, sleep-deprived and starting to get frazzled. I'd downed a pot of coffee beforehand, but it seemed to be having little effect on how I felt or how tired I was. Daisy, meanwhile, was perfectly fine -- it was her "daytime," since she works night shifts. She's used to being awake and alert all night long. I was okay overall, but being that tired also puts me into an ADHD-like mode -- I become obsessive, jumpy, paranoid, etc. I function fine, yes, but I'm burnt-out underneath the surface and everything I did during that time is fuzzy when I try to recall it the next day or a few days later. I was okay to drive and told her so, but she refused -- she took us all the way back home, despite the fact that she was getting tired herself by the second half of the trip. We got to Omaha shortly after sunrise (so, around 7:30 or so) and went to bed soon after. We slept until close to 4PM, at which point I got up, made coffee, and tried to wake myself fully before we went out to take care of our evening plans.
Throughout the trip, I was plagued by stomach issues -- I don't know exactly why, but it was probably a combination of allergies, sleep deprivation/switching my schedules around, sleeping on Daisy's bed (which also gives me back problems) and eating a lot of different foods I don't normally eat. I'll get to this more in a bit, but keep it in the back of your mind for the time being.
It was probably around 65 on Tuesday afternoon -- gorgeous and clear. It was cold driving in the overnight hours beforehand, but as we slept and the day progressed, it was warm and nice. I wore shorts and a zip-up fleece jacket. Daisy wore flip-flops and a light dress because it was so nice. This was a mistake on both our parts.
We went to JCPenney that evening, leaving the house around rush hour, to look for jackets for me. We found a few, but they were at least one size too small. We chose Penney's because they were having a big clearance sale on sport coats and suits, and could get them cheaply there if they had them in my size. I'll remind you, I'm not a huge guy, but I'm large. My sizing is weird because while I am not huge, I do have wide shoulders and I am barrel-chested, so it's hard for me to put on a jacket that would otherwise fit fine if my shoulders weren't so wide that I can't raise my arms without popping the seams on the sleeves.
Anyway. The largest size JCPenney had in stock was a 52 long. I could wear a 52 long, but it wouldn't close at the buttons. I asked if they had a 54 long, and they didn't, but they could order one.
"We could go home and order one," Daisy said, "and still get the style and size we need with all of the discounts from coupon codes and the like."
I agreed. We now knew the exact size we were looking for, so we could look other places if we wanted to. Daisy suggested that before we order anything, we should look in Kohl's to see if they had something I liked in stock in my size. So, to Kohl's we went. By the time we got there, it was dark, and the temperature had gotten considerably colder -- it was easily in the low 40s with some wind. Hm. It was also spitting a little rain, which -- as we were walking to the door from the parking lot, was turning over into light snow. Snow. Fucking snow. On MY spring break.
Kohl's was fruitless in the search for coats; the largest one they had was a 48. They may have had one or two 50s, but again, way too small. They had a good clearance section for clothing, though, except none of it was in my size either. I browsed through some of that, found a plaid fleece shirt that was marked down to $5.50 and got it, and Daisy got some nice, pretty green towels for our new household -- towels that were something like 80% off.
When we left Kohl's -- which, really, we had gone to in order to kill a bit of time before the movie we were planning to see -- it was whiteout conditions outside. It was snowing like fucking crazy, and it was beginning to stick to everything. Big, dense, thick snowflakes, the kind that all stick together and are perfect for snowballs. It was not yet, however, sticking to the roads, and the roads were just wet. We went to the movie theater, got our tickets and snacks, and sat down for Mr. Peabody and Sherman -- which Daisy liked, and I absolutely loved. They did it so well.
Upon coming out of the movie theater, the snow was much worse than it was when we went in, and the wind was whipping it around like crazy. Remember: we were wearing rather light clothing, as when we had left the house it was like, 65 outside. At this point there was at least an inch on the ground and the passenger door of Daisy's car, which was facing the wind, was covered in a layer of snow so thick that I could barely see the handle.
By this time it was also close to midnight; we'd gone to the second-latest showing of Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and had shared the theater with only three or four other people, a family who sat about ten rows behind us. It was quiet, the theater's parking lot and the city streets were mostly deserted, and we...were not feeling that great.
Remember how earlier, I mentioned that I had stomach issues for most of the trip? Well, Daisy did too, off and on, and I think the trigger for a lot of those issues was that particular movie theater's popcorn. It was terrible. Both Daisy and her mother had gotten ill from it once before, but this time Daisy said it wasn't much different. Mine tasted stale and way, way too salty, and Daisy maybe only got through a third of hers before she gave up on it because hers was just as bad. Mental note: if we go back to that theater again...we're not getting the popcorn.
So, feeling slightly ill from that but needing to put something on our stomachs to get rid of it, we opted to go get our vegan pizza from Night Flight. I've written about Night Flight here before on a few occasions, but it's a pizza place in Omaha that we really like, and it has overnight hours -- they open at 4PM and close sometime in the middle of the night (2, 3, something like that). They're also very vegan friendly, at least one of the owners is vegan, and Daisy knows the staff really well because she's been going there since...high school? College at least? Anyway, they know us, but they know her super-well because she goes there about twice a month or so.
Well, apparently one of the longtime workers there keeled over and died from a heart issue about three weeks ago, or something like that. Daisy knew him decently well, but hadn't heard about it. We were told the story at great length when we arrived that night, and it was...well, it was very sad and heartbreaking. The guy who died was only 46, he'd just gotten engaged and was getting married next month, and the entire situation was tragic. It upset Daisy quite a bit, as she knew him. We were also the only ones there in the restaurant in the middle of the night, so we were able to get the whole story about what had happened before we got our food -- but it definitely cast a bit of a pall over the entire evening. Daisy got a sympathy card for all of them at the pizza place last night before we returned to Kansas, as it was the least she could do and she hadn't known about his passing until this week (so she didn't go to the funeral or anything like that).
When we returned home with our leftover pizza, Daisy put on a few episodes of her new favorite television obsession, Sister Wives, and I used my computer for a bit/wound down somewhat. By this time it had finally stopped snowing (the roads were beginning to freeze by the time we came home that night), but there was probably close to two inches of fresh snow covering everything. It was enough to where I put a towel down in front of the back door so that I wouldn't track in snow off the porch when I came back in from smoking.
Again, it had been 65 or so that afternoon. I don't even know how the snow was able to stick -- the ground must have frozen really quickly.
When I got up the next morning around 10, it was already 50 degrees and the sun had melted all of the snow off of everything it touched. Three hours later, it was close to 70 and everything had completely melted and dried -- you wouldn't have been able to tell that it had snowed at all. It was so strange. And I thought the weather in Kansas was weird.
My stomach issues persisted, however; I'd only awakened that morning at 10 because I had godawful heartburn, and that combined with the back pain from sleeping on Daisy's bed (I seriously don't know how she sleeps on that thing) made me miserable enough to get up. I dug through the kitchen medicine cabinet until, in the back, I found a bottle of generic Walmart-brand Tums, and took about six of them. I looked at the label to find that they'd expired nine years ago, in 2005. Still, they worked. I would rely on these antacid tablets several more times over the course of my visit.
I let Daisy sleep; I knew she was tired, and I knew she needed the rest to make up for all of the sleep she hadn't gotten over the course of the previous 36 hours or so. I don't think she got up until after 3PM, and I wasn't going to bother her. We didn't have anything pressing we had to do that day; everything could wait until she'd gotten enough sleep. In the meantime, my stomach issues extended to my, ahem, backside parts, and I was just trying to feel better myself and get more to normal.
I'd forgotten to ask Daisy how to run Netflix on their TV, as I need to watch the last two seasons of Breaking Bad and that was good a time as any to do so. Dad has everything wired up and accessed through a Roku box, and I've never used one of those before so I'm clueless as to how to operate one without messing any of those electronics up. Dad showed me how to run it once, but that was a year ago (or more), and I really don't remember any of that now. I'm good with computers and I'm good with most technology in general, but anything I'm not familiar with -- especially something that isn't mine -- I don't mess with and don't know how to use. For example, Mama texted Daisy while we were driving somewhere, and she handed her smartphone to me and asked if I'd text her a reply. My response, after looking at it for a moment like an idiot: "Uhh, no, I won't, because I don't know how to work this damn thing, as it doesn't have buttons to press." This is 100% true. My phone is a flip phone; if you want to text someone, you hit the actual numerical buttons until the letter you want pops up. I don't know how to use any of those newfangled touchscreen-based bullshit things, nor do I necessarily want to know. I'll have to get a new cell phone/plan sometime this summer, more than likely, and I asked Daisy if you can even get a phone now that isn't a smartphone. She wasn't sure. I'm not even sure. I so wish I could just have my magenta Razr V3 again.
After that we went out to dinner at Crystal Jade, as I mentioned before. It was good; it was pleasant and fun. I got to meet one of Daisy's friends I'd never met before, and good food and conversation was had by all. We basically closed the place down. We were the last ones there in the restaurant -- I don't know what time they normally close, but as soon as all of us were outside, they turned off the lights and locked up, which was a sure sign we were there a little later than they'd expected to have customers. Crystal Jade calls itself a "Pan Asian" restaurant, and this is true -- they had all sorts of different stuff. I ended up getting some crab rangoon, beef fried rice (my go-to when I don't know what the food at a place is like, as it's hard to fuck up beef fried rice no matter where you go) and some curry noodle soup. Daisy had some sort of fried tofu concoction that I tried, and it was okay too.
Upon returning home, with one of our best friends (and Daisy's maid of honor) coming back with us to hang out for a while, we logged on to JCPenney's website and ordered my jacket for the wedding -- a black linen-cotton jacket with pockets, 56 long (a size bigger than I need just because we want to ensure it will fit well) -- and with coupon codes and their clearance sale (which expired that night, so that's why we had to do it then), we got it for under $60. Including free ship-to-store. It will arrive in about three weeks at the store near Daisy's house, and she'll pick it up. Daisy bought it for me, as she'd already worked that purchase into the wedding budget. I think it looks really nice, it's classy, and it's something I'll be able to wear for more than just the wedding. I wanted one with pockets because, well, I use pockets. More than half of the ones we looked at in-store had decorative pocket flaps only, and the material was too stiff and unwieldy to wear for a long period of time. The one I picked looks good, and it looks comfortable.
As an aside, we wanted to go to the Men's Wearhouse too, but the only black jacket they had in my size on their website was $379. I haven't spent $379 on any and all clothing purchases TOTAL over the past five years or so combined.
So, at this point we'd basically accomplished any and all things we'd been meaning to do while I was there. We went to our movie, we had our pizza, we'd gotten me a vaping kit, we'd gone out with our friends, and we'd gotten my jacket. Those were the big things, obviously, that needed to be done.
What was left? Not a lot. We hung out with our aforementioned friend until around midnight, when she had to go back home and go to bed as she had work in the morning, and then we did the other thing that Daisy had planned for us to do: we watched the entirety of the first Anne of Green Gables movie. All THREE AND A HALF HOURS of it. Ahem.
Daisy has been meaning to sit me down and make me watch this movie ever since we've been a couple. No, seriously, the entire time we've been together. I will, eventually, watch the other two films as well, if only out of morbid curiosity to see what happens to this Anne Shirley character. I liked it fine, though as it is thirty years old, it's a little goofy in places, and I'm sure Daisy didn't appreciate my commentary during the...ahem... "bosom friends" sequences. Because, of course, leave it to me to arch my eyebrow at things like that, as the years of my life spent in academia beat into my head the concept of reading into characters' thoughts/actions/intentions to pull out hidden meanings for literary criticism.
After the movie was over, I almost immediately went to bed. I got up about five hours later, again with screaming back pain and terrible heartburn, and went downstairs to sleep on the couch to see if that would help. It did, and I slept until almost 4PM yesterday. We went to the Dollar Tree (where I bought everything this time around, since Daisy had been paying for everything for me/us the entire trip), Daisy ate some dinner and cleaned up the house, and we packed up everything and left Omaha. We got back here early this morning.
Since Daisy left I haven't done a whole lot -- again, I'm in the decompression stage, and I'm guessing I'm not going to be awake late tonight, as I need to sleep and recuperate somewhat from the week. I got my health insurance packet in the mail today, but haven't opened it yet. I started one of my loads of laundry while I was typing up this post, and I haven't eaten anything today yet. I don't really want anything, honestly, as I'm not particularly hungry. My digestive issues have settled, though, so that's a plus. The cats are fine; they didn't even go through half of the food and water I'd set out for them. and they didn't tear anything up or get into anything while I was gone. They have, understandably, been quite clingy since we got back home, though.
Over the weekend I have some important things to do, but none of them really have a set timeframe aside from updating/reminding my students what's coming up next week. I will cover that stuff, as it requires a fair amount of detail, in my next post here -- whenever I write it. For now, though, I should probably get something to eat and try to get some rest.
My Spring Break: day eight
I have returned safely to Kansas after our trip to Omaha, and Daisy just left to go back home a little over an hour ago, as she works tonight. Now begins the time of the great decompression, the winding-down of a long break and a trip that, while fun, was quite tiring, and at times, moderately stressful. We returned last night in the overnight hours, and arrived this morning around 5AM. She drove us to York, and I took us the rest of the way -- over 200 miles, as I kept an eye on the trip meter in her car. When we got here, we put everything away that needed to be put away, I made something to eat, and then she went to bed. I showered and followed about an hour later. I got up around 1; she got up a little after 2. I made her waffles for breakfast, and then she left for home.
The trip was long and mostly busy, especially when coupled with the fact that both of us were off our sleep schedules. I'm still off mine, obviously -- a good chunk of my weekend will be spent playing catch-up on sleep, and taking care of stuff around the house that needs to be done in the meantime, since I've been gone for most of the week -- like the several piles of cat vomit which have manifested because the cats still don't know how to eat when I'm gone, so they gorge themselves and then puke. Over and over. I have to do all of my laundry from the trip, I have two new bills that have come in over the course of the past several days (cable and Discover card bill), I have to re-clean the cat room, etc.
Right now, of course, I'm relatively low on energy. That's why I mentioned "the great decompression" above, because that's what I'll be doing over the next day or so at least -- decompressing, winding down, returning to my normal routines and trying to get back into the groove of being alone here again with the cats and my solitude.
"Do you think I'll get to see you again between now and the end of the semester?" Daisy asked me this morning, in reference to the fact that it's not incredibly far off, but also because my class schedule resumes as per the normal again on Tuesday with no other breaks from now through mid-May.
"It depends on whether we both have time, babe," I said. "My classes resume Tuesday, and my schedule goes back to normal teaching again. It depends on if you have time to take off and/or can make time to come down with all of the wedding stuff coming up."
Of course, I'm always happy to see Daisy and have her around; even if I have a busy week ahead of me, I can always plan a few days ahead, at least, to re-order the stuff I have to do (such as grading and lesson planning) to maximize our time together. I had three stacks of papers and a stack of journals to grade through before I left for Omaha, and I did all of those at once last weekend so that I wouldn't have them hanging over my head or be bogged down by them upon my return home this weekend. I did my taxes last weekend so that I wouldn't have to worry about those, either. I took care of everything I could take care of and cleared a big swath of time for us, is what I'm saying -- and I don't expect to find myself much busier than that at any given time for the rest of the semester, so I could do it again.
We did a lot over the trip up there in the short timeframe we had to do it. Rather than give you a detailed day-by-day rundown as I usually do (because, again, I'm tired) I'll hit the big beats and will go into detail on the ones that deserve a little further explanation and/or attention:
1. I now have a jacket for the wedding (or I will, once it arrives).
2. I also now have all of the invitations to give out to my friends/colleagues.
3. I got a new messenger bag (courtesy of Daisy's parents).
4. Daisy got me a vaping starter kit.
5. It snowed like hell on Tuesday night and had melted off by Wednesday afternoon.
6. We went to see Mr. Peabody and Sherman.
7. We had Night Flight Pizza and met up with a group of friends at Crystal Jade.
8. We began seriously discussing job and relocation plans for after the wedding.
Those are all of the big beats to hit, anyhow.
When we left here on Monday night, I was incredibly tired and strung out, sleep-deprived and starting to get frazzled. I'd downed a pot of coffee beforehand, but it seemed to be having little effect on how I felt or how tired I was. Daisy, meanwhile, was perfectly fine -- it was her "daytime," since she works night shifts. She's used to being awake and alert all night long. I was okay overall, but being that tired also puts me into an ADHD-like mode -- I become obsessive, jumpy, paranoid, etc. I function fine, yes, but I'm burnt-out underneath the surface and everything I did during that time is fuzzy when I try to recall it the next day or a few days later. I was okay to drive and told her so, but she refused -- she took us all the way back home, despite the fact that she was getting tired herself by the second half of the trip. We got to Omaha shortly after sunrise (so, around 7:30 or so) and went to bed soon after. We slept until close to 4PM, at which point I got up, made coffee, and tried to wake myself fully before we went out to take care of our evening plans.
Throughout the trip, I was plagued by stomach issues -- I don't know exactly why, but it was probably a combination of allergies, sleep deprivation/switching my schedules around, sleeping on Daisy's bed (which also gives me back problems) and eating a lot of different foods I don't normally eat. I'll get to this more in a bit, but keep it in the back of your mind for the time being.
It was probably around 65 on Tuesday afternoon -- gorgeous and clear. It was cold driving in the overnight hours beforehand, but as we slept and the day progressed, it was warm and nice. I wore shorts and a zip-up fleece jacket. Daisy wore flip-flops and a light dress because it was so nice. This was a mistake on both our parts.
We went to JCPenney that evening, leaving the house around rush hour, to look for jackets for me. We found a few, but they were at least one size too small. We chose Penney's because they were having a big clearance sale on sport coats and suits, and could get them cheaply there if they had them in my size. I'll remind you, I'm not a huge guy, but I'm large. My sizing is weird because while I am not huge, I do have wide shoulders and I am barrel-chested, so it's hard for me to put on a jacket that would otherwise fit fine if my shoulders weren't so wide that I can't raise my arms without popping the seams on the sleeves.
Anyway. The largest size JCPenney had in stock was a 52 long. I could wear a 52 long, but it wouldn't close at the buttons. I asked if they had a 54 long, and they didn't, but they could order one.
"We could go home and order one," Daisy said, "and still get the style and size we need with all of the discounts from coupon codes and the like."
I agreed. We now knew the exact size we were looking for, so we could look other places if we wanted to. Daisy suggested that before we order anything, we should look in Kohl's to see if they had something I liked in stock in my size. So, to Kohl's we went. By the time we got there, it was dark, and the temperature had gotten considerably colder -- it was easily in the low 40s with some wind. Hm. It was also spitting a little rain, which -- as we were walking to the door from the parking lot, was turning over into light snow. Snow. Fucking snow. On MY spring break.
Kohl's was fruitless in the search for coats; the largest one they had was a 48. They may have had one or two 50s, but again, way too small. They had a good clearance section for clothing, though, except none of it was in my size either. I browsed through some of that, found a plaid fleece shirt that was marked down to $5.50 and got it, and Daisy got some nice, pretty green towels for our new household -- towels that were something like 80% off.
When we left Kohl's -- which, really, we had gone to in order to kill a bit of time before the movie we were planning to see -- it was whiteout conditions outside. It was snowing like fucking crazy, and it was beginning to stick to everything. Big, dense, thick snowflakes, the kind that all stick together and are perfect for snowballs. It was not yet, however, sticking to the roads, and the roads were just wet. We went to the movie theater, got our tickets and snacks, and sat down for Mr. Peabody and Sherman -- which Daisy liked, and I absolutely loved. They did it so well.
Upon coming out of the movie theater, the snow was much worse than it was when we went in, and the wind was whipping it around like crazy. Remember: we were wearing rather light clothing, as when we had left the house it was like, 65 outside. At this point there was at least an inch on the ground and the passenger door of Daisy's car, which was facing the wind, was covered in a layer of snow so thick that I could barely see the handle.
By this time it was also close to midnight; we'd gone to the second-latest showing of Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and had shared the theater with only three or four other people, a family who sat about ten rows behind us. It was quiet, the theater's parking lot and the city streets were mostly deserted, and we...were not feeling that great.
Remember how earlier, I mentioned that I had stomach issues for most of the trip? Well, Daisy did too, off and on, and I think the trigger for a lot of those issues was that particular movie theater's popcorn. It was terrible. Both Daisy and her mother had gotten ill from it once before, but this time Daisy said it wasn't much different. Mine tasted stale and way, way too salty, and Daisy maybe only got through a third of hers before she gave up on it because hers was just as bad. Mental note: if we go back to that theater again...we're not getting the popcorn.
So, feeling slightly ill from that but needing to put something on our stomachs to get rid of it, we opted to go get our vegan pizza from Night Flight. I've written about Night Flight here before on a few occasions, but it's a pizza place in Omaha that we really like, and it has overnight hours -- they open at 4PM and close sometime in the middle of the night (2, 3, something like that). They're also very vegan friendly, at least one of the owners is vegan, and Daisy knows the staff really well because she's been going there since...high school? College at least? Anyway, they know us, but they know her super-well because she goes there about twice a month or so.
Well, apparently one of the longtime workers there keeled over and died from a heart issue about three weeks ago, or something like that. Daisy knew him decently well, but hadn't heard about it. We were told the story at great length when we arrived that night, and it was...well, it was very sad and heartbreaking. The guy who died was only 46, he'd just gotten engaged and was getting married next month, and the entire situation was tragic. It upset Daisy quite a bit, as she knew him. We were also the only ones there in the restaurant in the middle of the night, so we were able to get the whole story about what had happened before we got our food -- but it definitely cast a bit of a pall over the entire evening. Daisy got a sympathy card for all of them at the pizza place last night before we returned to Kansas, as it was the least she could do and she hadn't known about his passing until this week (so she didn't go to the funeral or anything like that).
When we returned home with our leftover pizza, Daisy put on a few episodes of her new favorite television obsession, Sister Wives, and I used my computer for a bit/wound down somewhat. By this time it had finally stopped snowing (the roads were beginning to freeze by the time we came home that night), but there was probably close to two inches of fresh snow covering everything. It was enough to where I put a towel down in front of the back door so that I wouldn't track in snow off the porch when I came back in from smoking.
Again, it had been 65 or so that afternoon. I don't even know how the snow was able to stick -- the ground must have frozen really quickly.
When I got up the next morning around 10, it was already 50 degrees and the sun had melted all of the snow off of everything it touched. Three hours later, it was close to 70 and everything had completely melted and dried -- you wouldn't have been able to tell that it had snowed at all. It was so strange. And I thought the weather in Kansas was weird.
My stomach issues persisted, however; I'd only awakened that morning at 10 because I had godawful heartburn, and that combined with the back pain from sleeping on Daisy's bed (I seriously don't know how she sleeps on that thing) made me miserable enough to get up. I dug through the kitchen medicine cabinet until, in the back, I found a bottle of generic Walmart-brand Tums, and took about six of them. I looked at the label to find that they'd expired nine years ago, in 2005. Still, they worked. I would rely on these antacid tablets several more times over the course of my visit.
I let Daisy sleep; I knew she was tired, and I knew she needed the rest to make up for all of the sleep she hadn't gotten over the course of the previous 36 hours or so. I don't think she got up until after 3PM, and I wasn't going to bother her. We didn't have anything pressing we had to do that day; everything could wait until she'd gotten enough sleep. In the meantime, my stomach issues extended to my, ahem, backside parts, and I was just trying to feel better myself and get more to normal.
I'd forgotten to ask Daisy how to run Netflix on their TV, as I need to watch the last two seasons of Breaking Bad and that was good a time as any to do so. Dad has everything wired up and accessed through a Roku box, and I've never used one of those before so I'm clueless as to how to operate one without messing any of those electronics up. Dad showed me how to run it once, but that was a year ago (or more), and I really don't remember any of that now. I'm good with computers and I'm good with most technology in general, but anything I'm not familiar with -- especially something that isn't mine -- I don't mess with and don't know how to use. For example, Mama texted Daisy while we were driving somewhere, and she handed her smartphone to me and asked if I'd text her a reply. My response, after looking at it for a moment like an idiot: "Uhh, no, I won't, because I don't know how to work this damn thing, as it doesn't have buttons to press." This is 100% true. My phone is a flip phone; if you want to text someone, you hit the actual numerical buttons until the letter you want pops up. I don't know how to use any of those newfangled touchscreen-based bullshit things, nor do I necessarily want to know. I'll have to get a new cell phone/plan sometime this summer, more than likely, and I asked Daisy if you can even get a phone now that isn't a smartphone. She wasn't sure. I'm not even sure. I so wish I could just have my magenta Razr V3 again.
I adored that phone.
Ahem. Anyway.
Our only Wednesday plans were to go to a vapor shop, because Daisy wanted to see if I'd like vaping, and to see if I wanted to get a vaping kit to help me smoke fewer cigarettes and/or eventually quit, and then meet up with friends at Crystal Jade (a Chinese restaurant) for dinner at 7.
The vapor shop was fine; I mean, it was interesting, at least. I have several friends who have vaporizer pens and use them a fair amount, and I know a few people who now use them exclusively and have basically quit smoking. I tried a few different flavors and a few different pens, though I realized how quickly it irritated my throat and chest -- the vapor itself, if I used the pen more than two or three times in a ten-minute timeframe or so, made me feel like I was drowning, and it made my throat tighten and ache. I found one I liked, one that tasted like an actual cigarette ("Turkish tobacco") and Daisy got me a bottle of that liquid and a starter kit pen.
Meh, it's okay.
No, seriously. It's just okay. I cough on the vapor, a lot, because it's quite literally water vapor being inhaled into my lungs with some nicotine in it. It irritates the shit out of my throat if I use it for more than a few minutes at a time, and yes, I do feel like I'm inhaling liquid, so I can feel the fluid in my lungs and throat. It will take a lot of getting used to if I'm going to be able to switch over to that. It works fine -- and when I say that it means that it does the job -- and I'm optimistic that it won't hurt and/or make me feel like I'm drowning once I really get used to it, and it's much cheaper than cigarettes...so I mean, it's a viable option if it doesn't keep messing up my throat and chest. The bad part is that the "starter kit" I got will burn out its wick/heating mechanism/vaporizer unit in about two weeks' worth of regular use, which is why they called it a starter kit. That shop has all sorts of different parts and mechanisms to make your vaping experience fully customizable and the like, but two weeks of use is still only two weeks of use, and after that it's going to be pointless once that thing burns out, as it's not like I can magically teleport myself to Omaha to get more vaping supplies.
I told Daisy I'll use it until it burns out and then I'll either get more stuff/parts/etc when I'm up there again or I'll get a more higher-end unit if I like it and want to keep doing it -- but that's seriously going to depend on whether or not my throat/lungs can handle it and get used to it. I like it just fine, but until my lungs and throat do, I can't really help that. And she understands, of course -- she tried a few of the fruity flavors they had when we were doing our "taste testing," and she had the same throat irritation I did.
After that we went out to dinner at Crystal Jade, as I mentioned before. It was good; it was pleasant and fun. I got to meet one of Daisy's friends I'd never met before, and good food and conversation was had by all. We basically closed the place down. We were the last ones there in the restaurant -- I don't know what time they normally close, but as soon as all of us were outside, they turned off the lights and locked up, which was a sure sign we were there a little later than they'd expected to have customers. Crystal Jade calls itself a "Pan Asian" restaurant, and this is true -- they had all sorts of different stuff. I ended up getting some crab rangoon, beef fried rice (my go-to when I don't know what the food at a place is like, as it's hard to fuck up beef fried rice no matter where you go) and some curry noodle soup. Daisy had some sort of fried tofu concoction that I tried, and it was okay too.
Upon returning home, with one of our best friends (and Daisy's maid of honor) coming back with us to hang out for a while, we logged on to JCPenney's website and ordered my jacket for the wedding -- a black linen-cotton jacket with pockets, 56 long (a size bigger than I need just because we want to ensure it will fit well) -- and with coupon codes and their clearance sale (which expired that night, so that's why we had to do it then), we got it for under $60. Including free ship-to-store. It will arrive in about three weeks at the store near Daisy's house, and she'll pick it up. Daisy bought it for me, as she'd already worked that purchase into the wedding budget. I think it looks really nice, it's classy, and it's something I'll be able to wear for more than just the wedding. I wanted one with pockets because, well, I use pockets. More than half of the ones we looked at in-store had decorative pocket flaps only, and the material was too stiff and unwieldy to wear for a long period of time. The one I picked looks good, and it looks comfortable.
As an aside, we wanted to go to the Men's Wearhouse too, but the only black jacket they had in my size on their website was $379. I haven't spent $379 on any and all clothing purchases TOTAL over the past five years or so combined.
So, at this point we'd basically accomplished any and all things we'd been meaning to do while I was there. We went to our movie, we had our pizza, we'd gotten me a vaping kit, we'd gone out with our friends, and we'd gotten my jacket. Those were the big things, obviously, that needed to be done.
What was left? Not a lot. We hung out with our aforementioned friend until around midnight, when she had to go back home and go to bed as she had work in the morning, and then we did the other thing that Daisy had planned for us to do: we watched the entirety of the first Anne of Green Gables movie. All THREE AND A HALF HOURS of it. Ahem.
Daisy has been meaning to sit me down and make me watch this movie ever since we've been a couple. No, seriously, the entire time we've been together. I will, eventually, watch the other two films as well, if only out of morbid curiosity to see what happens to this Anne Shirley character. I liked it fine, though as it is thirty years old, it's a little goofy in places, and I'm sure Daisy didn't appreciate my commentary during the...ahem... "bosom friends" sequences. Because, of course, leave it to me to arch my eyebrow at things like that, as the years of my life spent in academia beat into my head the concept of reading into characters' thoughts/actions/intentions to pull out hidden meanings for literary criticism.
After the movie was over, I almost immediately went to bed. I got up about five hours later, again with screaming back pain and terrible heartburn, and went downstairs to sleep on the couch to see if that would help. It did, and I slept until almost 4PM yesterday. We went to the Dollar Tree (where I bought everything this time around, since Daisy had been paying for everything for me/us the entire trip), Daisy ate some dinner and cleaned up the house, and we packed up everything and left Omaha. We got back here early this morning.
Since Daisy left I haven't done a whole lot -- again, I'm in the decompression stage, and I'm guessing I'm not going to be awake late tonight, as I need to sleep and recuperate somewhat from the week. I got my health insurance packet in the mail today, but haven't opened it yet. I started one of my loads of laundry while I was typing up this post, and I haven't eaten anything today yet. I don't really want anything, honestly, as I'm not particularly hungry. My digestive issues have settled, though, so that's a plus. The cats are fine; they didn't even go through half of the food and water I'd set out for them. and they didn't tear anything up or get into anything while I was gone. They have, understandably, been quite clingy since we got back home, though.
Over the weekend I have some important things to do, but none of them really have a set timeframe aside from updating/reminding my students what's coming up next week. I will cover that stuff, as it requires a fair amount of detail, in my next post here -- whenever I write it. For now, though, I should probably get something to eat and try to get some rest.
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