My New Job

After eight months of intermittent (and mostly un-) employment, I snagged a mostly full-time job with health, dental, vision and retirement benefits. The company has stores nationwide, the atmosphere is fun, and my boss and coworkers are genuinely nice people. And yet I am still finding it difficult to come right out and tell people that I am now employed - at a bowling alley.

Every time I think the words "bowling alley", I see the scene in the Dudley Moore film, Arthur, where the butler tells Liza Minelli's character, his voice totally deadpan, "We usually have to go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of your caliber".

It is very nice, however, to have a regular paycheck, and health insurance has been an almost forgotten dream these past few years. The only thing I don't like about it is my schedule, which shifts back and forth from afternoons to late nights (sometimes at late as 3 a.m.), plus I am generally working all weekend most weekends, including every Saturday evening. Another positive, though - lots of fodder for future blog posts.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm almost finished with America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation. I'm fascinated by the stories that help make our historical figures more than two-dimensional ones about which we were made to memorize name/date/battle factoids. I'm glad I didn't arrive with the Puritans!

I chose Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs because I just finished the Gary Jennings novel Aztec Autumn his sequal to Aztec both about the Spanish conquest of the Americas, but told from the conquered point of view.

Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs just looked interesting.

I'll let y'all know.

(A sub-note: Blogger is making me learn HTML in order to format this the way I want it. I've resisted learning HTML this long; I resent having to learn it now. Hmph!)

Drum Circle

I went to my first drum circle in Florida this evening. (See my little-used-of-late doumbek above; it seemed happy to have a night out.) The circle was facilitated by Shannon Ratigan (http://www.drumcircles.net/) and is held every 4th Wednesday at Coconuts Comedy Club (http://www.coconutsclearwater.com/). It was very nice, low-key, about 20 people were there and Shannon had a variety of hand drums and various percussion toys for people to play with, if they did not have anything of their own.

I asked the bartender about the comedy club stuff, and I found out that they have open mic every Friday night at 7 p.m., $5 cover, and professional shows on Friday at 9:00, and Saturday at 7:30 and 9:00. I asked a couple more questions about how open mic night worked, etc., and then she gave me two free passes!

There was also some bellydancing, courtesy of Kimara and a couple of her students (http://www.beledibay.com/), plus whoever wanted to get up and dance some, including a young woman with a light-up hula-hoop! Since bellydancing is ALSO something I've always meant to get around to learning about, I put my name and e-mail address on their mailing list and got a copy of the class schedule.

The drumming circle ran from about 7:30 until probably about 9:30, but my ears got tired around 9:00 and I headed outside to go home.

Once outside, I chatted with a few people who were also taking a break, one of whom was Shannon's wife, Marti. She said she had taken her first bellydancing class with Kim the night before and really enjoyed it. When I mentioned that I was jobhunting (which I'm trying to make a point to tell EVERYONE), she said that someone who was normally in attendance, but wasn't there tonight, had been looking for an office manager, and she took my e-mail address, in case the position was still open. Wow! Drumming, a bellydancing class connection, free comedy club passes, and networking all in one evening!

My New Library Card and What I'm Currently Reading

First Official Florida Blog

We have officially landed in Oldsmar, Florida. The house we’ve rented was built around 1958, and while it feels quite spacious, the closets are pretty small, which means I have difficult clothing choices to make. *sigh* The kitchen, however, was recently redone and has great countertops, plenty of cabinets, a ceramic stovetop and a built-in microwave/convection oven, which I have become quite fond of in the past couple of weeks.

In the photos above, you can see the front of the house as we rented it, and then again after we spent this past weekend trimming back plants that had not had attention for at least a couple of years. It gives the front yard that awkward got-a-haircut-today look, but that will remedy itself in short order, and it has vastly improved our view through the dining room window.

There are many, many, many lizards in Florida. And many of them live in our yard.

I am currently job-hunting. I have had a couple of interviews, and the last one is quite promising, but I haven’t heard back from them yet, so I am still hitting the employment websites daily and sending my resume’ on ones that sound like a good fit and aren’t too far away.

Mom seems to be settling in nicely. We have cable that includes the Encore Westerns channel, and this is the one she watches most of the time. We had the movers put the comfy couch from Kerrville in the den, back by her bedroom and the office, but she prefers being in the living room, which is airier, has more light and windows from which she can watch for the mail carrier. So, we may be rethinking the use of half the rooms in the house, which will necessitate major furniture moving. Wheee!

Whichever of us gets up first gets the coffee pot started. If she gets up first, she lets me continue to sleep and does not turn on the LOUD TV until I am up. (Thank you, Mom.) If I get up first, I get the coffee started and when it is ready, I wake her up (at her standing request) for us to have coffee and read the newspaper together. By which I mean, we drink coffee, I read the newspaper, and she eats six to eight cookies and sometimes glances at the headlines of the newspaper before going into the living room to turn on the Western channel. At which point, I usually retreat to the office in the back of the house to play on the computer. The television is barely audible from back there, and if I shut the office door, I can’t hear it at all!

I have found a program here similar to the Dietert Center’s Take Five Club, but it is a little longer and costs $65 per day, so until I am working, I am reluctant to even introduce her to it, as I can’t take her now, and if she knows it costs anything, she will refuse to go at all.

So, she gets dressed so she can get the mail from the streetside mailbox, and we go grocery shopping on the weekend. She has a sandwich and chips for lunch after the noon news, and I have whatever sounds interesting whenever I finally get hungry sometime later in the afternoon. I cook dinner, either for Mother, Steve, and myself or for just Mother and me on the days he is busy with Scouting activities.

I am gradually getting the last of the boxes unpacked and things put away as I continue to wait for my new employer to call, whomever that might eventually prove to be. I know my perfect job is out there – I just hate this darned waiting part.

First Week in Tampa

For those of you who are not already aware - I've moved to Tampa, Florida! Steve finally won the "Move to Tampa/Move to Kerrville" debate, since his better-paying job coupled with still-teenaged son argument pretty much trumped the Kerrville is prettier argument.

So, here I am, alone in the apartment, ostensibly conducting a jobsearch (I HAVE sent out resumes!), and updating this blog that I haven't touched in several weeks.

Mom is currently staying with my niece in Kerrville, and we have the move set up for the end of the month, after Mother and I go to Dallas for my granddaughter's 2nd birthday. How did that baby get so big so quickly???

So many things have happened since the last blog, that it's difficult to even know where to begin, so I may not even try to recap. Suffice it to say that I'm really happy, and while Mother is not exactly excited about the move, she does like Steve, and doesn't seem to be overly fearful with the process.

While the last 17 months in Kerrville have been safe and restful and recuperative, I am so glad to be returning to a metropolitan area. It was nice to not have traffic and noise; it was REALLY nice to be able to see all the stars at night, and way fun to have deer feeding in our yard on a daily basis, but I have so missed having basic goods and services readily available, not to mention the availability of interesting community activities. Tampa has a very active drumming community, so I may actually be able to have a place to go to play on/with my little doumbek.

The area Steve's apartment is in is not the area we will be househunting, so things like getting a library card and finding the closest whatevers will have to wait until I know just what area we'll be settling in, but I should be able to start looking around for a writer's group, at least.

We picked up the Sunday paper for the employment ads, and one of the first things I see is a section with all these headshots of individuals who have been laid off for extended amounts of time, coupled with the salaries they USED to make. Put a little bit of a damper on my job-search enthusiasm, but not too much. There are still quite a few jobs posted in the newspaper that seem quite promising, and I have sent out several e-mails with resumes attached already.

Perhaps during the downtime amidst jobsearching, I will commit myself to writing something each day. Well, something besides e-mail. Something that might eventually turn into something a publisher might want to buy. I was reading a book about writing by the guy who co-wrote the "Left Behind" series (Jenkins, maybe?). I had to turn it into the Kerrville library before I was finished with it, but I really liked it and plan on finishing it at some point in time. One of the things he said that I have said about myself (in variation) for years, is that no one really enjoys writing, but enjoys having written. He said that putting one's butt in the chair and producing quality writing is hard work and not fun. Satisfying, when it's done, but not fun whilst being done. And this is my problem. It's difficult for me to stick with things that are tedious and Not Fun. *sigh*

But, I remind myself that anyone who was able to get her BA on the 17-year plan has the gift/skill/fortitude of perseverance, and should be able to accomplish anything she truly sets her mind to. Now, I just have to get to the productive butt-in-the chair part.

Daddy was in the Navy.

Daddy had a tattoo on his arm of a girl in a two-piece swimsuit. He got it when he was in the Navy during World War II, which I think is before they called them bikinis. He talked about how a very large island woman had done the tattoo while he was very drunk on jungle juice. He also said that in its original form, the woman had been naked. Before he was due to come home to Arkansas and his church-going, Sunday School-teaching Southern Baptist mother, he had to go get her swimsuit put on. He said that the swimsuit part of the tattoo, applied when he was stone-cold sober, hurt a lot worse than the initial naked woman part. If asked, he would flex his bicep so she would wiggle a little bit.

Daddy also had small scraps of shrapnel imbedded under his skin on his arms and legs. I asked him why he had never had them removed. He said that at the time, the bits of metal had been so hot that they cauterized and sealed the wounds on their way in. Since there was little chance of infection, medical care was reserved for those boys whose wounds were much more serious than Daddy’s had been.

Daddy didn’t talk much about his time in the service. One time I asked him about it, and he talked about how he was just a kid, and all the other boys were just kids, too – on both sides of the fight. He talked about the drinking water on board ship being sea water that was put through water treatment to make it drinkable, but that it still tasted brackish. He said it was very hard to drink that water knowing how many young men had died in the ocean it was pulled from. He talked about a Japanese ship that was sunk near his ship, and seeing the Japanese boys in the water. He remembered one in particular because a crewmate standing beside Daddy had pointed a rifle at the Japanese boy in the water, and the Japanese boy raised his hands and went underwater, never coming up again. Daddy figured he inhaled as he went down, preferring dying there to being captured. Daddy’s crewmate laughed about it; I don’t think it ever struck Daddy as being all that funny.

The only other thing I remember Daddy mentioning was being stationed off the coast of New Zealand for eighteen months during his tour of duty. Mutton was the only meat available for restocking the ship's larders, and so they had mutton at every meal. The only time I ever remember Mama cooking lamb chops was one time when Daddy was out of town. I didn’t much care for lamb, either.

After Daddy passed away, my brother told me about how one of the ships Daddy served on had been sunk by torpedoes, and how Daddy had spent two or three days in the water, surrounded by pieces of his ship and dead crewmates. Daddy never told me about that part.