A Month to Be Moved Past Quickly

It’s been a long month. 

1. We’ve signed the contract for the new fence, the one that will block the sight lines between me and the neighbor.  I’m hoping that when he can’t see me anymore he will return to whatever quantum state he came from and cease to exist until some other unfortunate soul crosses his path and makes the mistake of looking at him.  And then he will be Someone Else's Problem, and thus invisible to me.

2. We’ve also had to put the rabbits under lock and key, as several times I had to gather them up from where they were hopping about my property.  At first I was concerned that it might be the neighbor, since he had explicitly threatened to harm the rabbits, but that seemed odd since the first rescue actually predated the neighbor issue.  It turned out to be the kids across the street.  Apparently nobody in their lives thought to tell them that riding their bikes up someone else’s driveway and turning their pets loose in a neighborhood full of dogs was perhaps not an acceptable form of behavior.  Fortunately each time we found the rabbits before any harm was done, and if the kids want to try again they can bring bolt cutters.

3. We are also in the process of switching banks.  We started this process in November, after the International Banking Conglomerate bought out our Big State Bank.  In fairness, we weren’t all that happy with BSB, since they had gone out of their way to show political support for Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) during the initial putsch that brought him to power, but things went swiftly downhill when IBC started imposing random fees and requirements for the privilege of accessing my own money.  Then, unfortunately, we got busy and we might have forgotten about the whole thing entirely had not another round of random fees and requirements taken place this month.  And so we move.  The new bank seems less ornery, which is nice, but it still means telling any number of commercial and employment institutions where the money is and has to go now, since all that is so connected anymore.

4. I’ve also come up on the Koch Brothers’ radar, apparently.  One of the fascinating things about Blogger is that it allows you to see who has been searching for your blog, and after the last post in which I mentioned Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) I noticed some traffic coming from a PR firm that was apparently investigating how the Koch Brothers are being portrayed online, with the goal of “restoring” their good name.  Good luck with that one, PR firm!  Remember to wash your hands when you’re done, and try not to deposit your 30 pieces of silver in any IBC with too many random fees and requirements.

5. Returning to the theme of telling people where the money is, we also have a new credit card this month since our old one was hacked.  There is nothing so entertaining as being woken up on a weekend morning by a call from your credit card fraud agency wondering why you spent so much money on overrated semi-Chinese food several states away and on a new cell phone with the same company that the last ID theft fiasco was centered upon.  Fortunately it all got straightened out with minimal fuss (thank you, credit card company!), but we’re still finding bills that aren’t being paid because they’re working with the old number.

6. I’ve spent much of this month trying to get my classes ready for the fall.  One will probably not get much of an updating – I had hoped to gut the class and start over with it, but perhaps next time.  A second is getting gutted and overhauled, though at least it is the one closest to my actual field so it’s interesting that way.  And a third is completely new to me.  The problem with that one is that much of it is based on the ideal of community service, but I am teaching it at Not Quite So Far Away Campus, which is not in the community in which I live.  This presents certain practical difficulties, not the least of which is the requirement for me to go out and essentially cold-call people to rope them into helping me.  This is not what this introvert regards as a good time.  It’s mostly getting done, but the process is just pulling teeth to me.

7.  We’re nearly through Series 6 of the rebooted Doctor Who.  On the one hand, we’re enjoying the shows very much, especially since Matt Smith’s Doctor has finally stopped being such a temperamental little twit and started to get more likeable (a process that took nearly all of Series 5).  On the other hand, Netflix runs out of episodes at the end of Series 6, which means that we will need to find Series 7 elsewhere.  Yes, this is a) hardly a problem and b) easily solved by throwing money at it, but still.

8. It’s the end of the summer, and those of you in academia know what that means!  Yes, wall-to-wall meetings!  Meetings about meetings!  Meetings to set up meetings to discuss the possible agendas of the meetings you’d be having if it weren’t for these other meetings!  Meetings to determine why so little progress is being made on actual work!   One of Kim’s former colleagues taught her a trick that I find myself using at all these meetings, which is simply to multiply the number of attendees by the average hourly salary of those attendees and then multiply that number by the length of the meeting.  You can then spend the rest of the meeting idly wondering what better uses you might have put that sum of money toward, such as potato chips.  Hey, you do what you have to in order to get through the day.

Yeah, I’m ready for fall.