Just Stopping In

Its cold outside.  Bitter cold.  Its the kind of cold, that if there is wind, it finds the proverbial hole in your pants.  Yes, its that cold.  I like cold weather, but a friend of mine said something, somewhat off-handedly that made me feel a bit bad when I said I liked cold weather.  She said, that's nice, I don't work outside.  That stopped me in my tracks.  I don't have to work outside.  I work inside, second floor, reference room, University Library.  I'm inside right now.  I'm wearing a pair of shorts and it is, according to WTHR's homepage 7 degrees outside.  Single digits... yummy.

Supposedly, the tempeture is going to be somewhere in the area of zero and, if we're lucky, in the negatives.  I like cold weather, I do.  I enjoy it more than hot weather.  I had my fill of hot weather when I lived in Texas.  If I never hear the phrase "heat index" again, it will be much too soon.  

I haven't update this blog in ages.  There hasn't been much going on, lately.   I've been working and paying bills; I did start to re-read the Harry Potter series.  Currently, I am about half-way through the first book.  I applied for a "tenure track" librarian position at the University Library.  I am in a pool of about 60 people or so.  I guess we'll see what happens with that.

Other then that, nothing much to say.  I just thought I'd stop by this little slice of cyber heaven and kick the walls a bit and maybe rattle the cages.  I hope all is well in your real and cyber worlds.

Blessings to all.

Boom-Boom Down

I did something this morning that I haven't done in a long time: I slipped and fell on some ice. I landed hard on my left hip. I didn't hurt myself, at least not that I feel, but I think I might of tweaked my back a little when I landed. I guess we'll see what happens as the day progresses. It was that proverbial "black ice," or clear ice. I didn't see it and before I knew it, boom, down I went. I think I jammed my finger as I caught myself more than I hurt my hip.

It what happens, when its been cold enough to freeze outside for a few days and then we have a night's worth of rain. Everything melts, save for a few spots here and there and I just happend to hit one of the "here's and there's" this morning.

The library, for all intense and purposes is in hybernation mode. Its the intersession between semesters so no one is really around. It is very quiet and a tad lonely, but I have been able to get somethings done.

Other than that, not much is happening in my slice of cyber-heaven.

A Post of No Note

I get to work sixty hours this week.  If you count this past saturday and tack it on to this week, it'll be sixty-eight.  I worked last night for an eight hour shift and I can tell, that I've grown soft.  I lost my retail legs.  I've been limping around today, favoring my left leg a bit.  The retail legs will come back soon enough.  

I'm sitting in the library, at the reference desk.  Its the tailend of the semester, the last day of finals, so I feel just a tad superfulious.  The usual steady traffic has dwindled to a slow trickle, if that.  Even the coffee kiosks are closed.  

Is it possible that Christmas is less than two weeks away?  Wow.  This year really has flown by.  

I'm sipping on a cup of coffee that was just brewed by one of the librarians.  It has helped, perk me up, pun not intended.  And, I just spilled some on my shirt, way to go DWC, way to go.  If it wasn't so warm in the library, I'd go get my sweater and put it on.

Not much is happening in my little slice of heaven I call Indiana.  Its cold, but that's expected.  I am doing the ubiquitous "talking to a girl" and am in the process of tweaking the resume for submission.  Just your basic life.

What Does it All Mean

Christmas Decoration

My mom and I have really missed my dad the last two weeks, or so. Not in the crying our eyes out, mourning, putting on sackclothe kind of way. No, it was more of a "man, we miss him because he did this, or that to make things a little easier." Case in point: Christmas decorations. In years past we would take one day and get everything up. I would up the tree, my dad would sit on the couch and untangle lights and my mom would be setting up other decorations in other rooms. Then, as I put lights on he would take out the tree ornaments, put them in an upturned boxtop and shoo the cats away from the pretty red rounds ones. And then he and I would put the ornaments on and be done by dinner.

This year it took my mom and I longer to get the stuff up. Almost a week. We did it when I was home from work. I put up the tree and the lights one day and then over the course of two or three days we put the ornaments on. Our house was awash with Christmas decoration boxes (plastic tubs we bought at WalMart a few years back).

The decoration is done, now. The plastictubs are back in the shed, and our house is somewhat festive. The tree, artificial, fills the picture window in front and the light reflect in the windwo itself. The cats sit under the tree and wrestle from time to time for possession of the tree.

Its a new Christmas time. A different feeling. Not so much sadness, but the feeling of missing something, or in this case, someone.

Cranium-sized Thermometer

My head is a barometer. Really, it is. A cranial shaped barometer. I can tell if the air pressure has gone up or down just by how my head feels. The weather changes drastically, I'm going to have a headache. The weather turns rainy for a while, my sinuses will run like Seabiscuit on the homestretch.

Today, I have a fairly unpleasant throb in my noggin. Its not a migraine, thank God, but its more of a knot in the head kind of feeling. I just want it to go away. It doesn't help that I have a flat screen monitor in front of my face. As a matter of fact, as I type this I'm not looking at the screen. I'm going by touch and hoping for the best. I'm not srue why flatscreen monitors have to be so bright. I mean thy really are almost too bright.

I get to eat lunch soon, maybe that will help. I'm going to gym later on today, that probably won't help.

I have lived in Indiana for six years. It will be seven next September. In all that time there has been an Aldi Food Store on the corner near my home since before we moved here. It is a rather nondescript building, brown, flat roofed, and in the great scheme of things, its rather squat in shape. In short, it doesn't have "flash" of, say, a Kroger.

So my mom and I, after running some rather unsuccessful errands, stopped off at the Aldi's store. A few weeks back, there had been a two page article in Time magazine all about Aldi's.

I'm going to cut to the chase: Aldi's is scary; very scary.

First of all, you want a shopping cart? Twenty-five cent deposit, please. Huh?

You want to use our bags? Ten cents a piece. Pardon?

I walked in ahead of my mom. She got a cart-- which is a story in and of itself. Short version: she someone coming out of the store. Said person offered her the shopping cart, only after my mom coughed up a quarter for the courtesy.

We got in and started walking around. When I was a kid living in New York I remember going to the ShopRite supermarket, I remember seeing black and white food packages with the label MSB. Which stood for Money Saving Brand. Basically, MSB was a step up from Government Issue. That's kind of what Aldi's reminded me of. A store full of MSB.

The most frightening part of the whole experience was getting out of the place. We couldn't figure out how to get out. We could see the front door, but we couldn't get there. My mother didn't want to buy anything. She thought that Aldi's was more expensive than the Kroger or Walmart or even Sam's Club (yes we shop at the Evil Empire...)

The way this Aldis was designed was actually pretty slick: the only way you could go was towards the check out. We were, for lack of a better term, in a chute. We tried to get out through a closed check out lane, but there was a gate that wouldn't let us through. So, we backtracked literally. We went back through the "chute." And went out how we came in.

Once we got into the car we did a quick double debrief. Both my mom and I were just a tad freaked out. Neither one of us had ever felt trapped in a store before. We both literally felt like we couldn't get out. We finally escaped through the front door, after my mom abandoned her cart by the front door.

I wish I could describe the terror, yes, I used the term terror I felt after I could get out of there. It was one of the strangest feelings I've ever had....