BerthaBlog

The Artist was out front with the weed whacker, clearing up the overgrowth along the driveway. Duchess didn’t know what to make of it. She crouched on the back of the couch, watching him out the front window. When he moved to the side of the house, she ran over to the side door to watch from there.

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.

When I’ve got all the bookkeeping-type work caught up, I go see if the office manager needs help with any of hers. She frequently does. In addition to general office administration, she makes updates to the website, authors the church’s monthly newsletter, writes the weekly Sunday bulletin, and a host of other tasks.

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.