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Jun. 11th, 2025 12:34 pmWaitasecond wtf.
Boris &^(*&%ing Johnson is descended from E.A. Lowe, a.k.a. mentor of my paleography mentor?????
Boris &^(*&%ing Johnson is descended from E.A. Lowe, a.k.a. mentor of my paleography mentor?????
(no subject)
Aug. 3rd, 2020 07:57 pmRight, it's been a week, and I never posted about M's birthday. Crud, Well, while I'm waiting for the Yummy Bars to cool down enough to frost...
I can't remember most of the details of M's birthday. (I just asked E., who doesn't remember either.) In her case, that's because this was M's Official Birthday, in the same style as Queen Elizabeth II, and she also helped celebrate a couple of other times this year (hiking in NH, lemon meringue pie with M's family, socially-distanced or possibly zoomed occasion with friends. And I don't remember because that day I was mostly focused on having just driven P. to Canada, and was now trying to put in a full day at the office... So I think we had fish, or something, and she baked herself a cherry pie, because she's one of those people who will always go for pie, given the option. Possibly we sang?
The (in some ways) bigger news of that day was that it was the day when the landlord next door started putting up The Fence.
Our house's driveway, you see, abuts directly on our next door neighbor's driveway; both lead to a space at the back where the actual cars get parked.* So what we - AND the people in the apartments next door - used to do was to use each others' driveways as maneuvering space, sticking the back (or front) end of your car into what was technically the other driveway in order to get turned around.
For some bloody reason, however, the landlord of the house next door has evidently decided that their property Must Be Kept Separate, and is putting up a fence to delimit it. So far, it's just some metal posts, but chainlink or something is clearly going to follow, and in any case, there's now a post in the way when you try to back up. So using the driveway has now become a very tricky thing.
* At one point, what we were actually doing was sticking, like, two cars back there and having E. and the landlord park in the actual driveway, and then we had to stop doing that because of BS Belmont town ordinances, and now physically CAN'T do because of the fence.
I can't remember most of the details of M's birthday. (I just asked E., who doesn't remember either.) In her case, that's because this was M's Official Birthday, in the same style as Queen Elizabeth II, and she also helped celebrate a couple of other times this year (hiking in NH, lemon meringue pie with M's family, socially-distanced or possibly zoomed occasion with friends. And I don't remember because that day I was mostly focused on having just driven P. to Canada, and was now trying to put in a full day at the office... So I think we had fish, or something, and she baked herself a cherry pie, because she's one of those people who will always go for pie, given the option. Possibly we sang?
The (in some ways) bigger news of that day was that it was the day when the landlord next door started putting up The Fence.
Our house's driveway, you see, abuts directly on our next door neighbor's driveway; both lead to a space at the back where the actual cars get parked.* So what we - AND the people in the apartments next door - used to do was to use each others' driveways as maneuvering space, sticking the back (or front) end of your car into what was technically the other driveway in order to get turned around.
For some bloody reason, however, the landlord of the house next door has evidently decided that their property Must Be Kept Separate, and is putting up a fence to delimit it. So far, it's just some metal posts, but chainlink or something is clearly going to follow, and in any case, there's now a post in the way when you try to back up. So using the driveway has now become a very tricky thing.
* At one point, what we were actually doing was sticking, like, two cars back there and having E. and the landlord park in the actual driveway, and then we had to stop doing that because of BS Belmont town ordinances, and now physically CAN'T do because of the fence.
(no subject)
May. 9th, 2020 08:08 amIt is indeed snowing, albeit wetly and in a very half-@$$ed fashion.
ETA: Our resident meteorologist/bellringer, asked about this bizarritude, reported:
"Yay spring! The whole atmosphere is more turbulent in the spring, so we get pockets of warm tropical air moving north (like last weekend) and pockets of cold polar air moving south. This was just a boring spring until now, when we've had both extremes in a week. Good stuff (I say as I'm baking bread to heat up my apartment). Should be back to more average weather by Monday."
Anyway, it's now sunny, though still a frigid 42, so I'm going biking.
(Average number of new COVID-19 cases in Massachusetts per day this week: 1497.)
ETA: Our resident meteorologist/bellringer, asked about this bizarritude, reported:
"Yay spring! The whole atmosphere is more turbulent in the spring, so we get pockets of warm tropical air moving north (like last weekend) and pockets of cold polar air moving south. This was just a boring spring until now, when we've had both extremes in a week. Good stuff (I say as I'm baking bread to heat up my apartment). Should be back to more average weather by Monday."
Anyway, it's now sunny, though still a frigid 42, so I'm going biking.
(Average number of new COVID-19 cases in Massachusetts per day this week: 1497.)
So - I don't know if I've mentioned this before - I apparently need to resubmit my 2014 AMENDED tax return. wtff.
Which means trying to find my W-2s from back then (and so far I've failed in that), OR getting my employers of four years ago - and there are *seven* of those - to send me new ones.
Meantime, have definitely told friends in Waltham I'm not moving in with them, but while I thought I was going to be touring an apartment (that was going to be expensive but excellent) this weekend, I haven't heard jack about that. SO now I'm a tad worried.
To conclude, fml.
UPDATE: Having downloaded a 1040X, it *looks* like I don't have to include W-2s. (Which makes sense: they presumably already have the things.) Of course, I wish I'd realized that BEFORE I wasted an hour and turned my room upside down in a fruitless quest for them, but...
Now I just have to call them on Monday and figure out what the IRS *does* want...
Which means trying to find my W-2s from back then (and so far I've failed in that), OR getting my employers of four years ago - and there are *seven* of those - to send me new ones.
Meantime, have definitely told friends in Waltham I'm not moving in with them, but while I thought I was going to be touring an apartment (that was going to be expensive but excellent) this weekend, I haven't heard jack about that. SO now I'm a tad worried.
To conclude, fml.
UPDATE: Having downloaded a 1040X, it *looks* like I don't have to include W-2s. (Which makes sense: they presumably already have the things.) Of course, I wish I'd realized that BEFORE I wasted an hour and turned my room upside down in a fruitless quest for them, but...
Now I just have to call them on Monday and figure out what the IRS *does* want...
OK, well, I should be putting an Arisia proposal together right now. Well, TECHNICALLY I said I was going to do my Census post-class self-study today, so I should be doing that, but for reasons that will become clear in a few moments, Fuck That.
Sooo... the week before last, I think it was, I applied for a job as a...junior researcher, I think it was, at [Boston Research Consulting Firm]. VERY unusually, from my experience, the department head subsequently got back in touch, albeit mainly to tell me that I was horribly overqualified. (Which was possibly true, but a) I'm switching careers, kinda, so that's expected, and b) Hey, it's a job.) Usually, even if they DO get in touch to tell you you're overqualified, that's the end of it, and you're left feeling like "Well, fuck." In THIS case, though, he said he was going to forward my résumé on to Matt, the head of their Editorial department, because they might have some freelance editorial work down the line. And that could STILL have been the end of it, but Matt actually DID email me, to say "...please let me know your bandwidth (how many hours a week you would be available to edit our research content) and let’s set up a time to talk." So I write back, and then don't hear from him for over a week, while I sit around wondering what the heck has happened THIS time.
On Wednesday, after asking myself What Would My Dad Do?, I took a moment before Census training and called Matt's number to ask more or less exactly that question, and in due course we set up an appointment for this morning.*
-------
So I get there--it's the fifth floor in a faceless office park in Waltham--and have to wait a bit, and then meet Matt and get ushered into a conference room: all of which was expected. And THEN we spend like fifteen minutes chatting about German History--which was definitely NOT--before we get down to the nitty gritty of what the job entails. As I had expected, it was going to be more of what I've been doing for [cheapskate client in Germany], namely taking stuff written by experts and editing it so it's actually decent prose.
What I had NOT been assuming was an on-the-spot job offer.
And then came the moment I had been hoping wouldn't happen. "So what do you think would be a reasonable starting rate?" he asked.
Oh Shit. I mean, I know I've been horribly underpaid in the past, but this is a potentially globalized field, and I don't want to get to greedy, because I REALLY want this job...
"Let's start me at $15?"
Matt actually laughed in my face.** "Well, I'd LIKE to employ you at that rate--or at any rate my bosses would..."
"What can I say, I've been really underpaid!"
Anyway, I somehow managed to recover from this screw-up,*** and we agreed that I should start at their standard starting rate for editors.
...which is $45 per hour.
Pause to let that sink in.
Yeah.
I'm going to be working part time, but still.
wow.
I guess I should have learned from Harvard Business School that any time you add the word "business" to a job description, they jack up the salary.
* At this point in writing this, I took a pause to go look at what was probably a juvenile bald eagle, sitting on a tree about fifty yards down the shore. As you can guess from the preceding, I'm in Maine again.
** You probably just did too, given that $15 was what we figured MRE should have been paying me, and this is a much more highly-skilled job. (Though it's also a much more pleasant one, and you can't outsource [University]'s mailroom work to someone with good English in Mumbai.) What can I say, I panicked. Fortunately, [see above]
*** I should perhaps note at this juncture that Matt is yet another person who got a PhD but then decided he didn't want to teach, AND got it in German studies, so PART of all this was that he took pity on my post-academic floundering.
That sounds more self-pitying than I feel, I guess: the OTHER part is that I'm hella good at editing papers in questionable English, and amply demonstrated that I'm experienced in the same in the course of the interview.
Sooo... the week before last, I think it was, I applied for a job as a...junior researcher, I think it was, at [Boston Research Consulting Firm]. VERY unusually, from my experience, the department head subsequently got back in touch, albeit mainly to tell me that I was horribly overqualified. (Which was possibly true, but a) I'm switching careers, kinda, so that's expected, and b) Hey, it's a job.) Usually, even if they DO get in touch to tell you you're overqualified, that's the end of it, and you're left feeling like "Well, fuck." In THIS case, though, he said he was going to forward my résumé on to Matt, the head of their Editorial department, because they might have some freelance editorial work down the line. And that could STILL have been the end of it, but Matt actually DID email me, to say "...please let me know your bandwidth (how many hours a week you would be available to edit our research content) and let’s set up a time to talk." So I write back, and then don't hear from him for over a week, while I sit around wondering what the heck has happened THIS time.
On Wednesday, after asking myself What Would My Dad Do?, I took a moment before Census training and called Matt's number to ask more or less exactly that question, and in due course we set up an appointment for this morning.*
-------
So I get there--it's the fifth floor in a faceless office park in Waltham--and have to wait a bit, and then meet Matt and get ushered into a conference room: all of which was expected. And THEN we spend like fifteen minutes chatting about German History--which was definitely NOT--before we get down to the nitty gritty of what the job entails. As I had expected, it was going to be more of what I've been doing for [cheapskate client in Germany], namely taking stuff written by experts and editing it so it's actually decent prose.
What I had NOT been assuming was an on-the-spot job offer.
And then came the moment I had been hoping wouldn't happen. "So what do you think would be a reasonable starting rate?" he asked.
Oh Shit. I mean, I know I've been horribly underpaid in the past, but this is a potentially globalized field, and I don't want to get to greedy, because I REALLY want this job...
"Let's start me at $15?"
Matt actually laughed in my face.** "Well, I'd LIKE to employ you at that rate--or at any rate my bosses would..."
"What can I say, I've been really underpaid!"
Anyway, I somehow managed to recover from this screw-up,*** and we agreed that I should start at their standard starting rate for editors.
...which is $45 per hour.
Pause to let that sink in.
Yeah.
I'm going to be working part time, but still.
wow.
I guess I should have learned from Harvard Business School that any time you add the word "business" to a job description, they jack up the salary.
* At this point in writing this, I took a pause to go look at what was probably a juvenile bald eagle, sitting on a tree about fifty yards down the shore. As you can guess from the preceding, I'm in Maine again.
** You probably just did too, given that $15 was what we figured MRE should have been paying me, and this is a much more highly-skilled job. (Though it's also a much more pleasant one, and you can't outsource [University]'s mailroom work to someone with good English in Mumbai.) What can I say, I panicked. Fortunately, [see above]
*** I should perhaps note at this juncture that Matt is yet another person who got a PhD but then decided he didn't want to teach, AND got it in German studies, so PART of all this was that he took pity on my post-academic floundering.
That sounds more self-pitying than I feel, I guess: the OTHER part is that I'm hella good at editing papers in questionable English, and amply demonstrated that I'm experienced in the same in the course of the interview.
(no subject)
Apr. 28th, 2017 08:20 pmOK, indirectly pursuant to the last point of the previous post:
Roommate #1 wandered into the common area of the apartment this evening while I was having dinner, to tell roommate #2 (his SO, who was playing Skyrim) that Ja Rule has apparently (and perhaps inadvertently) swindled a whole bunch o' rich people out of a whole bunch of money.
Now what floored me was not that people threw down big chunks of cash on what was supposed to be luxury accommodation but in fact more closely resembled a refugee camp. No, what had me goggling was the sheer size of the amounts concerned. The figure roommate #1 quoted was $25 thousand, and in fact, we eventually realized that some of the tickets were a great deal more than that, but let's stick with 25k.
25k, although I didn't want to admit it in front of my roommates, is more than I currently make in a year.
And so we got to talking about all the things you could theoretically do with 25k, even assuming you want to spend a weekend filled with drugs and naked people, which I don't.* 25 thousand! I mean...with 25 thousand I could do pretty much ANYTHING I wanted,** not merely for a weekend, but for like six months. Heck, with 25 HUNDRED I could check into an AMC hut for like two weeks, WITH two weeks worth of good-quality alcohol,*** and go hiking every day and drink a bunch every night, or at least as much as wouldn't interfere with the hiking; which is my idea of a good time.****
I gibbered a lot.
But what brought my last post to mind:
"Yeah," said roommate #2, while trying not to get her character incinerated, "but if I got $25 thousand, I STILL wouldn't have paid off my college loans."
Holy shit. I... I mean, they have a presumably much more fulfilling job, and (I assume, at least) graphic designers make a good deal more than I currently do.
But apparently, they--and I guess a good deal of the rest of the population--have so much student debt that, even if I'd had to pay all my student loans MYSELF, I'd still be less in debt than they are.
* On reflection, I guess this isn't TECHNICALLY true, since I would love to spend a weekend with, like, ONE attractive person who was naked a bunch of the time, and some booze and probably also coffee or tea, which are technically drugs... but I want a relationship, rather than Girls Gone Wild, and let's skip the cocaine (and even the weed).
** OK, excluding anything involving buying real estate.
*** On reflection, I seem to recall that the AMC doesn't let you bring alcohol, but we're in fantasyland here anyway.
**** Yes, I did reflect - repeatedly - that my idea of a good time MIGHT be a little skewed from that of the rest of the population. To which I say: ok, that just means all y'all's notion of a good time is FUCKED UP.
Roommate #1 wandered into the common area of the apartment this evening while I was having dinner, to tell roommate #2 (his SO, who was playing Skyrim) that Ja Rule has apparently (and perhaps inadvertently) swindled a whole bunch o' rich people out of a whole bunch of money.
Now what floored me was not that people threw down big chunks of cash on what was supposed to be luxury accommodation but in fact more closely resembled a refugee camp. No, what had me goggling was the sheer size of the amounts concerned. The figure roommate #1 quoted was $25 thousand, and in fact, we eventually realized that some of the tickets were a great deal more than that, but let's stick with 25k.
25k, although I didn't want to admit it in front of my roommates, is more than I currently make in a year.
And so we got to talking about all the things you could theoretically do with 25k, even assuming you want to spend a weekend filled with drugs and naked people, which I don't.* 25 thousand! I mean...with 25 thousand I could do pretty much ANYTHING I wanted,** not merely for a weekend, but for like six months. Heck, with 25 HUNDRED I could check into an AMC hut for like two weeks, WITH two weeks worth of good-quality alcohol,*** and go hiking every day and drink a bunch every night, or at least as much as wouldn't interfere with the hiking; which is my idea of a good time.****
I gibbered a lot.
But what brought my last post to mind:
"Yeah," said roommate #2, while trying not to get her character incinerated, "but if I got $25 thousand, I STILL wouldn't have paid off my college loans."
Holy shit. I... I mean, they have a presumably much more fulfilling job, and (I assume, at least) graphic designers make a good deal more than I currently do.
But apparently, they--and I guess a good deal of the rest of the population--have so much student debt that, even if I'd had to pay all my student loans MYSELF, I'd still be less in debt than they are.
* On reflection, I guess this isn't TECHNICALLY true, since I would love to spend a weekend with, like, ONE attractive person who was naked a bunch of the time, and some booze and probably also coffee or tea, which are technically drugs... but I want a relationship, rather than Girls Gone Wild, and let's skip the cocaine (and even the weed).
** OK, excluding anything involving buying real estate.
*** On reflection, I seem to recall that the AMC doesn't let you bring alcohol, but we're in fantasyland here anyway.
**** Yes, I did reflect - repeatedly - that my idea of a good time MIGHT be a little skewed from that of the rest of the population. To which I say: ok, that just means all y'all's notion of a good time is FUCKED UP.
(no subject)
Apr. 18th, 2017 02:24 pmSo I forwarded G's Red Sox Exodus to [a clergy friend who shall remain nameless]. This being the retelling of the 2004 season that ends "...And the fans set fire to cars on Lansdowne Street. The Word of the Lord."
CFWSRN wrote back
"We did set fire to cars -- and it was very good!"
[boggles]
I mean, he may be kidding, or using "we" loosely, but even if so...
CFWSRN wrote back
"We did set fire to cars -- and it was very good!"
[boggles]
I mean, he may be kidding, or using "we" loosely, but even if so...
(no subject)
Mar. 10th, 2017 08:38 pmIt’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is like you made a show about the latter rulers of Charn - who looked as though they "had done dreadful things and also suffered dreadful things" - and then declared it a comedy.
(no subject)
Nov. 20th, 2016 07:34 pmOK, OK, zheesh! Sorry about the lateness: The last week I've been laid low by a combination of the cold (still with me!), depression, and a schedule that included three days of insanity at work followed by three days in Nashua looking after Peter. (And having an interview with a temp. agency.*) But anyway:
( My brother's house )
( My brother's house )(no subject)
Mar. 16th, 2014 12:25 pmOK, srsly world. Why is there not a "What is this I don't even" rubber stamp? Or perhaps one with "What the hell ass balls".
Such stamps should be issued, automatically and for free, to anyone who has to teach a writing-intensive course these days.
----
Addendum:
O, fml. I'm trying to cover Industrialization and 19th-c. ideological movements tomorrow, am't I. WHY did I think this was a good idea?
Such stamps should be issued, automatically and for free, to anyone who has to teach a writing-intensive course these days.
----
Addendum:
O, fml. I'm trying to cover Industrialization and 19th-c. ideological movements tomorrow, am't I. WHY did I think this was a good idea?
(no subject)
Oct. 16th, 2012 07:22 pmGood Lord, that was an earthquake.
And we thought it was just the dryer briefly going into synch with the one upstairs...
And we thought it was just the dryer briefly going into synch with the one upstairs...
Holy f^<#1n' $#!7....
I didn't realize before that the guy for whom I was editing Rorschach was also one half of the twins in Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Which means I grew up laughing at stories about him...
My brain go explode now.
I didn't realize before that the guy for whom I was editing Rorschach was also one half of the twins in Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Which means I grew up laughing at stories about him...
My brain go explode now.
