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.

The Director strolled by and attempted to pet her. She jumped about a foot and scooted out of reach.

“She’s all discombobulated,” I told him.

Seems he’d never heard that word before. “What’s combobulated?” he asked, laughing.

“It’s discombobulated,” I clarified, “I don’t believe combobulated is a word. It means she’s confused and disoriented. The Artist has the weed whacker out and it’s freaking her a little bit.”

“I guess that’s one of those words that always has dis in front of it,” he said.

“Yep. Kind of like I’ve never heard of anyone being gruntled.”

He was giggling for five minutes over that one.

This year, as our history teacher went over the syllabus, he warned us that we will have to buy our own ScanTrons this year, as well as the blue books. Evidently the school is really tightening its belt, or something.

Now I’m wondering if, at one point, the blue books were given out with exams.

The second week I was there she asked if I would mind looking over the Sunday bulletin, just so there would be a second set of eyes checking it for typos and errors.

Ten minutes later, I returned it with several little red marks—a couple of typos, a grammatical error or two, and one paragraph that I simply thought was worded awkwardly and offered a suggestion for improvement.

“I was an English major my first trip through college,” I cautioned her. “Never give me something to proofread unless you actually want it, you know, proofed.”

She was delighted. It’s not like she has a lot of mistakes, she just needed someone else to give it a once-over, and the associate pastor is frequently too busy to do it before it has to be printed. Now I’m proofing the bulletin practically every week.

It’s nice having a job that lets you use more than one skillset.

I also signed up for a basic history class, covering “western civilization.” I chose this class for several reasons:

• Ideally I plan to keep going to school as long as I have time and money to do so. A lot of the higher-level classes require the same first-year classes, like history, English comp, and basic algebra. I’ve already taken quite a few of those basics, might as well take the rest.
• It looked interesting, and I was afraid I wasn’t getting into my accounting class so I wanted to take something.
• All of my close friends and relatives are very smart people who can converse intelligently on things like history and world events. My history is quite weak and I can’t really participate. I plan to remedy this so I no longer feel like a fucking moron.

Our instructor is an energetic, self-assured Italian man who paces the front of the room and talks with his hands. He spent the first class going over the syllabus (this is apparently required, all teachers do it the first day) in between anecdotes about prior students and warning us about the dire consequences of plagiarism, failure to study, or not showing up on test day. He referred to himself several times as a “benign dictator.”

I like him already. This is going to be a fun class.

Earlier this week, checking on the waitlist, I grumbled “They’ve got enough people waitlisted to fill another class.”

I wasn’t the only one who noticed that; a day or two later I got a notice that a second class had been opened and the waitlisted people were all signed up for it. Woo hoo!

So I went off to buy a second textbook. I’m already signed up for a history class, just because it looked interesting (and I was afraid I wouldn’t get the accounting class, so I wanted to take something). My history book was $170 at the bookstore ($130 used); I rented it from Chegg.com for $60.

My accounting book? That one costs $211 at the bookstore ($158 used). I searched textbookly.com and found a (new!) copy for under $60.

Same books, half the price. Why do I feel like the textbook market is a bit of a racket?

At the checkout, I pulled out a couple of bags. “I have more if we need them,” I told the checker.

My son chuckled. “Yeah, she has a bag of bags.” He finds it amusing that my nylon bags are themselves stored in a nylon bag.

“Well of course,” I replied, “what would you keep bags in?”

“A box, of course,” he teased, “don’t you know anything?”

“I have two teenage children,” I laughed. “Of COURSE I don’t know anything!”

“Touché.”

I looked over at my husband. “Do you remember Joe Versus the Volcano, with the island people who loved orange soda and had all their clothes and houses and religious icons festooned with parts of orange soda cans?”

He looked back at me. “That’s what this ad has been reminding me of, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.”

I’ve reconciled Quickbooks with the bank, and with the office manager’s records of donations to the church. I did the month-end entries and transfers. I printed the numerous reports that will be needed by the Stewardship Committee next week.

Cricket patiently walked me through the whole process; there’s a remote-login program installed so she can see what I’m doing from her computer, and she talked to me on the phone as I went through all the steps. I took copious notes as we went along. Frequently she would stop me and ask why we were doing this or that, or what I thought we should do next, making me think about it so she could be sure I was understanding the process.

My brain hurts. It was fantastic.

“You don’t even need me any more,” she moped as we were finishing up. Then she brightened. “Oh wait, next month is the end of the quarter—you’ll need me for that!”

Oh, yes. Yes, I will.

As a result, he had never witnessed the performance.

*crack open tuna*

*cat appears out of thin air*

Marchesa: Is that fish?! I want fish!! I love fish! It smells so good! PLEASE give me fish! I must have some fish! OMG I HAVE NOT EATEN IN THREE WEEKS AND I WILL KEEL OVER DEAD IF I DON’T GET FISH RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!!

*accompanied by weaving around my legs, stretching up toward the counter, and general feline drama and histrionics*

Me: Here, just a little.

Marchesa: NOM NOM NOM MOAR PLZ

The Director: Do all cats meow that much when you have fish?

Me: Pretty much, yeah.