Subconscious Weirdness

 Dreams, General  Comments Off
Sep 302010
 

So in my dream, we were moving. Out of prison. There was a small group of us who had planned an elaborately-timed escape, so that our outside guy would show up with the truck at just the right time when the guards were all somewhere else. He showed up right on cue, and our group started loading boxes onto the truck.

Our group leader was wizened little black man whose right arm was gone below the elbow. I don’t know any such person in waking life.

Then the prison cook wandered in, a pale, skinny young inmate with frizzy almost-red hair. I yanked him out of sight of the guard towers, was about to beat him into unconsciousness, and then instead proposed he join us in escaping. He agreed and started helping load boxes.

Right before I woke up, I recruited another inmate. She was a tall black woman with tribal tattoos on her face and, inexplicably, a longbow. I introduced her to our group and she started loading boxes with us.

I know where the moving motif came from; last weekend I helped a friend with her move. It was a hurried affair because of the last-minute notice she got from her landlord, which reminded us both of the last time I helped her move—when she left her ex-husband, which explains the “breaking out of prison” as well.

The one-armed leader and the tribal warrior, I can’t explain.

 Posted by Bertha at 6:43 am

FalconCam

 General, Videos  Comments Off
Sep 222010
 

Video of a peregrine falcon and a goshawk, from the point of view of the birds—they’re wearing little cameras on their backs. I love watching raptors fly.

Actually, I just love raptors in general, they’re such ballsy critters. Here’s one of a peregrine pwning a red-tailed hawk twice its size:

 Posted by Bertha at 8:39 am  Tagged with: ,

Timber!

 General  Comments Off
Sep 212010
 

The folks who live up the street have evidently decided that they want no trees on their property. All last week, and so far all this week, we’ve heard the sound of chainsaws and felt the intermittent WHUMP of a section of tree hitting the ground. Large trucks with flat trailers have been parked down both sides of our road, turning our residential street into a vehicular slalom course. And did I mention the chainsaws? Constantly? All afternoon, when I’m trying to study?

Looks like they finally got all the trees down yesterday, though, because today there were no chainsaws.

Today they’re grinding the stumps.

I miss the chainsaws.

 Posted by Bertha at 6:14 pm

Whew

 Accounting Stuff, General  Comments Off
Sep 172010
 

Busy week.

Getting the reports ready for the committee, I was going through all our bank accounts and reconciling them with the bank statements—and I discovered our restricted fund account was over nine thousand dollars short of what my records thought it should be.

I have to say, the committee reports kind of lost their place in my priority queue. I looked more closely at the bank records, and discovered that a transfer that had been entered in our books in May was never actually performed—someone had forgotten to go online and actually make the transfer. To make matters more confusing, half of the transfer had been manually checked as “cleared,” probably from a mistaken mouse click, so when we’d reconcile our accounts with the bank we were showing us having way more money than we did.

I double-checked everything several times, got all of our bank accounts reconciled properly, and finally was able to do the reports. Except now my reports have a note on them explaining why one account is suddenly almost ten thousand dollars lower than it was last month.

Church Boss asked me if this wasn’t the sort of thing that should have been spotted months ago, and I didn’t know what to say—I’m afraid this will make Cricket look bad, which is the last thing I want to do. Besides, if an experienced pro can make a mistake, a n00b like me is bound to at some point.

 Posted by Bertha at 5:09 pm  Tagged with:

Anectode Seen on Pandagon

 General  Comments Off
Sep 082010
 

From the “If It Ain’t True, It Should Be” file, as seen on pandagon.net:

Back in 1985, I was flying back from London to Newark when one of the engines had a problem and the plane had to return to Gatwick. We had a choice of hotel or voucher, I chose a voucher because I was staying with friends—who had taken vacation the day I left. So, I didn’t get much sleep and arrived home 24 hours late.

I rolled through a stop line in the Newark airport parking lot, and was pulled over by a port authority cop. He asked for license and registration. I handed over the license looked for the registration. He went to write two tickets, one for failure to stop, and one for failure to present registration. When he came back I had the registration in hand. He refused to take it, saying I had to show it to a judge. I refused to accept the ticket, so he wrote me up for resisting arrest, at which point, I said, “You’re a cock-sucking mother-fucker.” At that point, we went to the Newark municipal court.

The cop told his story, and I told mine. (Keep in mind, this is a judge who is usually adjudicating serious felonies, not traffic offenses.) The judge said, under NJ law, you can present the registration at any time during the stop, and dismissed that ticket. He then said that under New Jersey law, it is not illegal to resist an illegal arrest, and dismissed that. Then he said, “Under the circumstances in question, the defendant’s description of the police officer in question was accurate.” I was given $10 for court costs and all was dismissed.

 Posted by Bertha at 3:55 pm

Putting Kids to Work

 Breeder's Corner, General  Comments Off
Sep 062010
 

The Artist didn’t do well his second semester in college.

He’s not the most forthcoming individual, but over the course of time we managed to glean that he wasn’t sure if architecture was the career he really wanted. He isn’t sure what he wants to do—he’s expressed interest in graphic arts, or astronomy.

Personally, I think he wouldn’t enjoy astronomy; I don’t think he realizes how much math is involved. Math is not his strong subject.

As the fall semester approached, his father suggested he sign up for three or four 100-level classes in subjects he thought looked interesting. That way he could get an idea of what they involved, and which one he might actually enjoy doing.

The Artist hemmed and hawed, and procrastinated, and by the time he got around to signing up for classes they were all full. He was waitlisted for every single one of them, and none opened up. With the economy in the toilet many people are going back to college, and the 100-level classes in particular fill up fast.

So he spent a few weeks flopping around the house. He slept all day, and stayed up all night playing video games. I would ask him to do something to help out, like mow the grass, and it wouldn’t be done when I got home.

Eventually Alpha Geek and I laid it out for him. “When you’re a child,” we told him, “we’re both legally and morally obligated to provide you with food, and shelter, and basic necessities. Now that you’re an adult, we don’t have to give you these things. We’re willing to support you while you’re in school, but we’re not willing to support you so you can sleep all day and play computer games all night.”

Of course, he’d heard all this before. But now I brought out my little spreadsheet—an estimation of The Artist’s share of our living expenses. I used averages of our expenses over the last year, divided by three, just to give me some sort of number to work with. Alpha Geek said I was much nicer than he would have been—he would have used the going market rate for renting out a room.

But our purpose wasn’t to tell The Artist that was how much rent he owed us. Instead we used it to figure how much work he’d need to do around the house to earn his keep. Alpha Geek made up a time sheet for him to keep track of what he does and how many hours he spends doing it. I wrote out a list of general maintenance chores, just to get him started with ideas of things to do. And we agreed that if he does work over his weekly minimum, we’ll pay him.

We set all that up a couple of weeks ago. Frankly The Artist seems to like it. He’s got a clear understanding of what we want from him, he feels like he’s contributing to the household, and he gets a little spending money each week to boot. Our yard hasn’t looked this well-kept in years, and it’s nice coming home and finding someone else has unloaded the dishwasher. He’s even vacuumed once or twice.

Meanwhile, The Artist has been asking when registration for spring classes starts. He was pretty disappointed to have missed it this semester, but I think now he’s got a better understanding of why I was pushing him to get on the ball and sign up early.

 Posted by Bertha at 3:26 pm  Tagged with: ,

Office Drama!

 General  Comments Off
Sep 012010
 

A new year is starting in churchland. The preschool classes are starting up again, the fall classes and activities are getting back into gear, the Wednesday night suppers will begin in a couple of weeks, students are signing up for the music lessons. And a whole new crop of people are rotating into the stewardship committee—the church equivalent to a board of a directors.

Both the people who oversee me are being replaced. Our new finance officer is the sort who jumps in and takes charge. She’s got a copy of the financial reports from the last stewardship meeting, and she e-mailed me a long list of questions about them. I spent last week, off and on, researching answers to those questions—I only started a month or so ago myself, so I’m still learning what went on before I got here. Many of them I had to ask Cricket about.

I didn’t mind it a bit; part of my job is, after all, explaining the financial reports. And answering all her questions gave me a better understanding of how everything was set up. Before I left Friday I e-mailed her with responses to all her questions. I expected I would hear about several of them again; they involve budget overruns that are going to merit some investigation.

And I did; Monday morning I got another e-mail from her, asking if she could come by on Thursday so we could go through the bills and insurance policies together. This time she copied the office manager, the associate pastor, and the new church treasurer on the e-mail.

Well. I’ve got nothing to hide in my office (other than confidential information about staff and church members), and normally I’d just remind her that I can’t stay past 1:00 on Thursdays because I have a class at two. But as I mentioned before, the new year is starting in churchland, and this week we’re swamped in the office. All those classes and programs and events require registration and records and bookkeeping of their various fees and tuitions. The end of the month brings its own set of tasks that must be attended to, including the newsletter that typically takes us a day or two to put together.

I didn’t have to say anything, though, because the next e-mail in my box was from the church treasurer. His opinion was that they should look over the questions and my answers at the next committee meeting, and put their heads together as a group before we start digging through the old bills.

After that I just sat back and watched the e-mails go by. There were only a couple more exchanges, and nobody got shrill or testy, but she was unmistakably frustrated at being balked in this manner. The last one I saw yesterday was from the treasurer, saying we had enough to do in the office and repeating his stance that further investigation could wait until the next committee meeting.

Today the office manager and I got another e-mail, just a brief, polite note that she wanted to make sure it was still okay to come by on Thursday. I observed that she did not copy the associate pastor or the treasurer this time.

Finally I got into the discussion again. I told her this week really won’t be good for the kind of intensive research we’ll need to do (particularly if she wants to go over the insurance policies), because of the aforementioned swampitude. I pointed out that we’re going to have to consult Cricket, and Cricket will be charging for her time, so we want to make the most of it and not try to do this when we’re distracted by other issues. And I offered to scan in the bills for some of the items in question so I could e-mail them to anyone who wanted to pore over them in detail. I also reinstated the associate pastor and the treasurer to the recipient list.

About an hour later the new treasurer phoned. “That was a good response!” he exclaimed.

“Wasn’t that diplomatic?” I replied. “I put a lot of thought into that one.”

We chatted a bit, he asked if I could send him a couple of reports, and we hung up.

It will be interesting to see what’s in my inbox tomorrow. I’m just way more entertained by this whole thing than I should be; I can’t wait to meet this lady.

 Posted by Bertha at 5:17 pm  Tagged with:
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