From the Office Window

This would be "frozen fog".  And that would be the airport runway across the field.

It's supposed to start raining soon though.  Lovely:  28° F and raining.

White Christmas and Projects

White Southern Oregon style.  No snow this year.

Cozy Christmas socks

Useful item: a pocket for the bed remote-control to hang between us.  (That's a remote to control the sleep-number, not a tv remote.)

Next up:  a sweater from Peg Gaffney's corgi knitting book.  Note brindle yarn.

Skywatch Friday 02/20/09

Striking clouds over Lower Table Rock on my way home, Tuesday 02/17/09.

 

Home, sweet home. Join is at http://skyley.blogspot.com

"Clueless in Costco"

Opinionator from the NY Times this morning.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

For a native Westerner, the slights from the other end of the country start early, and build through a lifetime: national broadcasters on election night who cannot pronounce Oregon (it’s like gun) or Nevada (it’s not Nev-odda), or a toll-free clerk who thinks New Mexico is part of old Mexico.

“You’ll have to go through your own embassy,” a resident of Santa Fe was told when trying to order Olympic tickets for games on American soil.

[Of course I have met people in Orygun who also do not know that New Mexico is a state, not another country.]

These are all minor annoyances, mind you, in a world with daily reminders that an embittered, small-hearted senator from Connecticut can hold up health care for millions, or some people would rather read a “book” by Hulk Hogan than a short story by Sherman Alexie.

Love Sherman Alexie. How can you not appreciate a writer who includes a scenario where a father tells his daughter that it's fine to marry the [native American] guy, but why would you ever share a bank account with him?

Detest Joe Lieberman.

For those with HBO

. . . who might have seen "Every F---ing Day of My Life" tonight:

Yes, as a matter of fact Southern Orygun in general and Josephine County in particular are the Appalachia of the Northwest.

And Ice Fell from the Sky

Subtitle: Why I came home early yesterday.

No, not snow. Ice. This morning the ice is still here as it hasn't yet been above freezing. But 27 is better than 6.

From the Medford Mail Tribune this morning: Icy conditions cause chaos.

"Southern Oregon Regional Communications, which dispatches for all areas in Jackson County outside of municipalities, reported about 20 accidents between 3 and 8 p.m. Friday, none of which were serious.

"The Medford Fire Department responded to about a dozen accidents during the same time period. All were believed to be caused primarily by the glaze of ice on the roads.

"Five to 6 p.m. seemed to be a very, very busy time for everybody," said Medford fire Battalion Chief Fred LaBrasseur on Friday. "The county was sending people on car accidents all over the place."

And of course I have a car which weighs about 150 lbs. Ok, I guess more than that we me and Huxley inside.

The finches are doing ok, but I think that the humming birds left.

And look: oh goody.  The fog is back.

T.G.I.S.

Not "real" snow, just frozen fog. Though the fog was so heavy yesterday that the weather button reported it as "snowing lightly". I know that the everlasting fog combined with the dark affects my mood, but it was a hard week nevertheless.

It would be pretty, if only I didn't have to drive to work in it most days.

I sometimes wonder if vacation days are worth it. They don't mean that I work less: it's just deferred until I return.  I took two days off before Thanksgiving and it left me behind all week.  I know that I shouldn't grouse about it with so many unemployed and underemployed people out there, but being "overemployed" is taxing (pun intended). I've now held "the day job" for 16 years and 3 months which means that I have spent basically all of my 40's there and am working hard on the 50's. My goal has been to leave when I hit 60 and some days that feels attainable while other days I despair that it won't be.

Sometimes I look back and can't figure out where the 16 years went; it feels as if the time was squandered.  And in another 16 years we'll be 73.  If it passes as quickly as the last 16 . . . and I fear that it will.

We would like to take another winter vacation in February or March and go to where the sun is shining.  It would be so much easier to leave if there was one more person in the department as my understudy and to do the invoicing.  Kathy handles the a/p and payroll now, except for the more involved bills and the taxes.  Mari processes payments and does a good job with collection calls.  Both answer calls with billing questions and are kept busy 40 hours per week.  I really can't assign any more tasks to either, especially when they see personnel in another department get paid for knitting and reading books while they wait for the phone to ring.  Kathy knows how it is because she worked in monitoring before moving to my department in 2003.  She learned to crochet there.  But on the other hand working for me does not require nights, weekends, and holidays.

I would so much like to spend my time knitting and reading books . . .

Of course I would have no place to put an additional person in our office, were I allowed to hire one.  When the office was redesigned a few years ago, our department was short-changed on square feet per person.  We have a beautiful spacious central station, and have been told it is a showplace for the industry.  We have a sales department with a lovely conference room and private offices for people who are seldom in the office.  But such is the way in the business world.

Other depressing news for the week:

The Bandon shows are not on the 4th of July weekend in 2010.  We will need to go ahead and release the campsites we reserved to lose only the reservation fee.  If anyone wants to go to Bandon and camp on the non-dogshow weekend let us know right away.  There appear to be lots of campsites still available for the following weekend: the 9th-11th or 12th.   The Lost Coast (Ferndale) shows will be 3 days on 4th of July weekend (the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th) and I presume that Redmond will also be that weekend.  And if you want to go to Bandon the dogshow weekend, let us know that as well (and which nights) so that we can reserve the appropriate number of spaces.

Yesterday would have been Jawoo's 16th birthday.  I miss her: though it's the young-to-middle-aged Julie I miss, not the ancient dog she had become.

Yesterday an ultrasound revealed that in spite of 4 witnessed ties Nola is not pregnant.  So there will truly be No-Pies.

Tuesday night when we returned from the SOKC meeting there was a message that Wendy-Sue, littermate to Kacy and Axel, had died the day before.

On the plus side, I finished the socks I was working on over Thanksgiving.  I'm keeping this pair.  Other recent projects included a pouch for holding cell phone, glasses, book, etc. for my side of the bed in the trailer.  Only Tom's side has a nightstand which has been inconvenient for me.  I'll take a picture of that someday when it's hung up and in use.

I've knitted on-and-off for years, though I started on large projects like afghans which I did not always carry with me.  Socks are much easier in that regard and are useful as well so I have enjoyed working on them.  I presume that there have been family members who did not realize I could knit (or for that matter do anything considered at all domestic).  When I was working on my socks last week in California the remark was "Oh, you're knitting socks.  How nice.  That's the first thing we did as children when we first started knitting, before we moved on to bigger projects."

The only thing I could figure was that maybe they were tube socks with big yarn.   The fitted socks are actually somewhat more complicated than the afghans, sweaters, hats, etc that I have also knitted. Humph.

Time to quit playing on the blog and to get some programming work done for the other job.  And I have the laundry detergent set out in the kitchen to thaw as it solidifies in the garage where the washer and dryer are.  The garage is refrigerator temperature when it's this cold outside.

Maybe the sun will peek through tomorrow or the next day.  Do not believe the NOAA forecast linked on the blog.  It is obviously written for people flying by in airplanes.