Miscellaneous

This Will Not Look Good on My Resume

Moriah

If you want some droll (adult) humor, go buy this. Seriously. It’s the funniest thing I’ve read this year, and I’m not sure, but it may be the funniest thing I’ve ever read, period.

Amazon (print or Kindle)
Smashwords

“Everyone gets fired at least once in their life. And if not, well, they’re just not trying very hard. And we all think of brilliant and immature ‘shoulda saids’ and ‘shoulda dones’ for weeks after. (Okay, years.) In this collection of loosely related stories, Brett shows again and again that getting fired is really quite easy.”

Dear neighbors…

Moriah

(…who would know this blog existed if you ever bothered to come talk to us…)

We are not obligated to go ’round the neighborhood introducing ourselves and presenting ourselves for your approval as The Right Kind of People. Not when we moved in five years ago. Not now.

It’s yours. Your obligation to come to us to find out who we are. Until you do that, your judgments about us are your problem, not ours.

If you had come to our door, you might have realized we are quiet, well-educated and well-traveled people who live our lives with honor and dignity. The county government and police department have, fortunately, already realized this, thanks to your meddling.

You will not take that dignity and quiet away from us because you hate that your 40-year neighbor died and we bought her house. You will not take that dignity and quiet away from us because you hate that the neighborhood demographic changed nearly overnight from the nearly dead to the newly hatched. You will not take that dignity and quiet away from us because we don’t spend 24/7 working on our lawns because we’re too busy working on improving the whole of our lives.

We pay the same taxes you do, even though we don’t make as much money as you made when you were working, and you are now retired on the Social Security we are paying. You can judge us and co-opt our children when you start paying our mortgage, for the infrastructure repairs you can’t see on this 45-year-old house, and for someone to keep our lawn for us.

If our biggest sins are that we keep to ourselves, we’re quiet, and we let our tax deductions have a bit more physical freedom than you deem is proper, and we don’t have as much money or free time as you do, we can live with that.

No, we aren’t The Right Kind of People. And if you are, then we don’t want to be.

And oh, P.S. We don’t need to be friends with you. We need you to mind your own business.

Organization: the neverending quest

Moriah

This is my office right now:

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It doesn’t look organized, but it is. It’s organized two ways, and one is more effective than the other.

You see, the (1) clutter demands attention and for good reason: It’s important. Stuff I have to do. Stuff that, if I file it neatly away in the (2) three-ring to-do binder buried underneath all that mess, I will forget about and never do and screw up my life.

The goal is to not screw up my life.

But what about filing? you ask. Eh. Filing is for stuff you have to keep but rarely use: tax returns, vendor catalogs, vehicle and health and vet information. Stuff like that. If I had my ’druthers, I’d be able to stick it all in a file box like the one I keep my year’s tax receipts in after I’ve entered the bucket full of receipts into Quicken.

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What about tossing? you ask. Yeah, what you’re looking at is after having ruthlessly tossed and shredded. Trust me, I get rid of whatever I can the minute I lay hands on it and determine it’s worthless to me.

So after ruthlessly tossing-and-shredding, and piling things on my desk in a way that will remind me of its importance, the best way I’ve discovered to not screw up my life and still stay clutter-free is to hang all the important stuff up on the wall.

This demands cork. Or steel/whiteboards magnets. Something. Just get it off my effing desk! I want elbow room and work space. Throw in some effective cord management.

Stylishly.

I want style.

Because there is no style here. I can stick pins in the sheetrock all day long and it’ll do the trick, but I want some style. Martha Stewart Living style. Only more realistic. And cheaper.

So what I’m working on in my organizational efforts is to find a stylish way to hang all my stuff on the walls where I can see it at a glance without boxing myself into a stylish but useless and expensive space.

But I can’t even decide on a paint color.