Reading

Entry tags:

travel

Birds and Bits

I've posted the birdwatching report from my New Zealand trip on my Alpennia blog (https://alpennia.com/blog/new-zealand-birding). The non-bird parts to come.

Today's rhythm was thrown off by the need to check in at 11:30 on my potential jury duty service. Which also meant that when I went online to set up an optometry appointment, I didn't think I could commit to the "earliest possible" slot next Tuesday, with the next options starting in late October. And then when I checked in and found I was excused from jury duty, that next Tuesday slot had been snapped up.

It became clear to me on the NZ trip that I really needed to update my vision prescriptions, though in part this was because I was doing a lot more close-distance reading than usual and it became clear that one of my eyes has drifted more than the other. Then coincidentally, yesterday I got a note from Kaiser saying that my current glasses prescription was about to expire (it's been two years) and I should make an appointment.

But anyway, since I didn't want to go off on the bike this morning because of the check-in, I wrote up my birding notes. And now I'm thinking that since my routine is already off, I could just go off script entirely for the rest of the day. (Yes, yes, I have a fixed routine in retirement. What can I say?) Maybe I'll do something wild and crazy like pick rose hips. I have three or four bushes that have a lot of hips--enough to do something interesting with, anyway--and it might be fun to try some comparisons.

Current Mood: hopeless
Current Location: dining room table
Current Music: suspicious silence

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The Enshittification of Everything

I swallowed my pride and ego last week and realized that the best course of action for work is to apply for a school lunch lady. I remember looking at them while in line at the High School cafeteria - all of them looking like they were 80. High probability they were in their 50s, but they were short, dumpy, had those old lady humps, walked like they had bad hips, gray haired, glasses, and old lady Reboks. I remember being sad for them, and scornful, and maybe a little afraid. I didn't ever want to be an old lady working in a school cafeteria. That was for "unskilled" people. People with limited educations and probably limited intelligence. I was going to go to college and be educated and get a good job that paid well.

Except I never really did that, did I? Oh, I had "good jobs" as defined by my parents - easy office jobs of mind numbing horror doing inventory and clerical and answering phones and slowly withering away in cubicles where I neither understood nor cared (except caring that it made my life so incomprehensibly awful) about the politics going on around me.

And now here I am, over 50 and all those years of doing shitty clerical work can't even get me a job with the school and the way to break in is to be a Lunch Lady and maybe work up to hall monitor and then maybe one day promoted to secretary. And I am wracked with shame and an inferiority so badly I can taste it. So I put in for lunch lady and hall monitor jobs and wouldn't you fucking know that in less than a day the middle school near me called for an interview.

The whole thing made me fucking sour I was like to throw up, but I went in and to my great surprise it wasn't for a lunch lady job but a hall monitor spot, which was better than I had thought. The lady doing the interview I knew from Sera's many IEP meetings and was like "Really? Hall monitor?" I interviewed for it anyway and was told to go home and apply for the Para (teacher aid) spot and to email her as soon as I did so, so she could pull it. Also to get my licenses in order - to the tune of 150 I didn't really want to put on the card.

But I haven't heard anything back yet and just this morning the High School is asking me to come in to interview for a lunch lady spot. And I'm shamed all over again.

Entry tags:

travel

Back from New Zealand

I deliberately left my laptop at home during my 2-week trip to New Zealand to ensure I wouldn't slip into "working," but that means I'll never catch up on dreamwidth posts. I hope to do a "trip report" on my Alpennia.com blog (since that's the easiest place to post pictures), but given that I never posted a trip report for last year's post-Worldcon travels, we'll see what actually happens.

TLDR: I had marvellous fun, spent two weeks hanging with my BFF, enjoyed seeing a part of the world I'd never been before, had amazingly good weather for all but the last day, and fell in love with tree ferns. (Alas, no way I could grow them at my house even if I had the space.)