Yes, indeedy, it's cherry season again and Ms. Packratty has been on the "fruit and tea" regimen that always seems to set in when cherry season peaks and the cherry prices drop under $3 a pound. Thank heavens this phase only lasts for about 3 weeks, 4 tops, because by the time cherries once again become insanely budget-bustingly expensive, Ms. Packratty is TIRED of them, if one can indeed be tired of the Nectar of the Gods.
Fruit and tea means that Ms. Packratty stumbles home from work (more on that later) and washes off a good mess of cherries in the colander and dumps them in a paper-towel-lined bowl and then goes forth to read her email. Somewhat later, she thinks about dinner but is already stuffed on cherries, so she makes a cup of tea and tries to stay awake long enough for the news at 10 to come on.
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The reason that Ms. Packratty is stumbling about in a daze is that the staff at her workplace is currently about half of what it should be, yet our users continue to mess up the programs, the hardware and the data at the usual pace. This sudden decline in workforce is due to the canning of two co-workers (one of whom richly deserved it); the lateral move of a third; and the defection of a fourth to a position with almost no commute, better pay, better benefits and no requirement that he wear a tie every bloody day of the year. The fifth co-worker developed kidney failure and congestive heart failure and nearly died, so it is difficult to hate him for his absence.
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Management has scurried about recruiting replacements, who might be competent to answer the phone by Labor Day, while motivating us with the occasional lunch and some movie tickets. Forget that noise - motivate me by taking the pay for the 5 empty positions and divvying it up among those of us who are carrying a double workload! Cash bonuses? Ha. They think a cold quesadilla from Chilis is going to do the trick. Can we say "updated resume" boys and girls?
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Meanwhile we have the Memorial Day weekend approaching and while the parking slots for the Executive Gods are already mostly empty, the Help Desk will be staffed both the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and on Memorial Day itself. Those who matter (the expensive cars in the reserved spots) will mostly be gone for a week centering on Memorial Day itself. Really motivating. Really. Truly. Ms. Packratty will be working on the Saturday and have the Tuesday off.
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Needless to say, not much knitting or de-packratting has been getting done, but there have been a number of interesting things going on.
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First of all, it has been late spring and that has meant all sorts of raging animal attraction going on everywhere. While it was cool enough to have the windows open there for a while it was too darned noisy - too much muskrat love sort of stuff going on. It's been dry, so the frogs have been very quiet, though, those can be deafening even with closed windows in a rainy spring.
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Dry brings me to other things, like the fires burning a hole in south Georgia and northern Florida. The winds shifted early this week and on Tuesday, Atlanta was blanketed in stinky smoke - heavy enough to look like fog, but smelling like the bottom of an ashtray. It blew away, but it was sheerly awful while it lasted. Thousands of acres have burned and hundreds of people are losing homes and livelihoods.
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In other developments, the woman who lives downstairs is either fighting with her old girlfriend who moved out but who seems to be hanging around a bit or is fighting (usually at 2:30 a.m.) with someone new. The style of fighting - slamming doors, screaming, thumping on walls, does not seem to change, regardless of who the second combatant is. I'm really, really, really really tired of this woman and her dysfunctional lesbian love life. I'm tired of the fact that she cannot seem to shut a door without slamming it so hard that things rattle upstairs. I'm tired of her untrained, unaltered and badly-bred Boston terrier yapping at me and getting Charlie all worked up.
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Yes, Danielle, I want you gone. I don't care how anymore and that's why I no longer call the cops when you are fighting - because horribly enough, I find myself hoping that either you or your partner in combat will seriously damage the other, leading to jail or hospital or something for you and peace and quiet for me. And yes, I am horrified that I possess this sort of evil desire for bad things to happen to you, but dammit - you've woken me out of a sound and peaceful sleep or prevented me from attaining same too DAMN MANY TIMES. We will not even discuss the fact that you don't want your creepy assortment of scuzzball friends smoking cigarettes or joints in your house, so you send them onto the deck, where the clouds of stinking smoke drift in my open windows, meaning that even in marginally clement weather, I am forced to shut the windows and sliding doors.
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Exhaustion does have some good points - at least
budgetwise. Ms.
Packratty has managed to resist the siren song of various yummy yarns and continue knitting when possible on the chocolate brown merino monster or the Jitterbug socks ... but she had a little sort of yarn falling down thing when she found a sale at
http://www.littleknits.com/ and might have ordered a wee bit over the minimum purchase in sock yarn. Not much, just 3 pair of socks worth including some Fleece Artist Merino in Nova
Scotia ... I was hideously tempted by the Hand Maiden Sea Silk, but resisted. The
CBMM and the hat for Dad and the shawl for
Marleen are all in queue ahead of anything else. I will be strong. I will be strong. I will be strong.
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The other thing that irritates the pee out of me lately is when someone is conducting a knitting blog or a dog blog or whatever and they drag political comments in with this smug assumption that all right-thinking people must think the way they do. Well, I have news for them - when I log in to read a knitting blog, I am not there to read about your politics, etc. For whatever record there might be, Ms. Packratty considers herself to be a moderate who does not think it is ever appropriate to call the President demeaning names. Ms. Packratty even refrained from calling former president Clinton names when he was in office and given that Ms. Packratty is a feminist and she believes that the former president is a rapist or the very next thing to one, that was *difficult*. Hereby ends Ms. Packratty's political commentary.
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Nor does Ms. Packratty ever want to see or hear anyone ever demeaning or disparaging the men and women of the US Armed Forces. Please note that while there have been bad apples, in almost every case of said bad appledom or bad actions in the US military, it has been people within the military who blew the whistle on the bad actors. Unlike the civilian world where warrants, investigations and grand juries are often required to sniff out malefactors. Not to mention that military justice is both swifter and nastier than civilian justice. Nor does she much like the bashing of graduates of the various service academies - especially when such bashing is coming from the mouths or pens or keyboards of persons whom Ms. Packratty is mortally certain could not have hacked it out at West Point or Annapolis or Colorado Springs for so much as a month, let alone 4 years. Yes, Ms. Packratty is biased. She has relatives and ancestors who attended the service academies and believes them to be superb insitututions that focus on physical, mental and moral discipline.
EOT
