kitty

say hi to chilly. feel free to feed him, 'cause i'm sure i'll be a bad mommy and forget.

i'd like to have a cat again someday.

*eye roll*

(does blogger have spell check and i'm just missing it? i reeaaallly can't spell.)

i like the person who is the other secretary in this (university) office. she is the full time secretary/events person/receptionist and i am the part time secretary/graduate coordinator/keeper of all things academic. i do not particularly like that she won't leave me alone.

she has consulted me today on the following important decisions:

• the colors for the cake at the graduation reception (called me from her desk)
  
• the actual type of cake - marbled or half/half? (walked across hall almost immediately after hanging up from previous conversation)
  
• (after i said "half/half") if one half is chocolate, should the other half be yellow or white?
  
• what time should we decorate on Friday (mind you, the semester's over, half of the professors don't come in everyday and there is no particular schedule to follow. answer is: whenever)
  
• what should the student's graduate gifts say (options are various combinations of "class of 2006" "member of the class of 2006" "in recognition of the class of 2006", etc.)
  
• what time should be reception start? (she ran the one last year)
  
  

now, this woman has is some years older them i am (she has a child graduating high school), has been working here for over a year, and makes more money than i do. any one of those things ought to mean that she can independently make a decision about CAKE. part of what's annoying about this in general is that after a year (i would think), you would pick up on the flow of information within your workplace (in this case, almost entirely through the university website. anything you ever wanted to know, or at least a phone number of who to ask, on occassion. want to know when the ceremony is over and when to start the reception? look at the graduation website.).

it would seem that at her previous university job, everything was done by committee, everybody was super-huggie-friends and the whole office was decorated in pastels (after discussion with the commmittee). at this university, we each have our own desks, our own jobs to do and, yes, will occasionally have a staff meeting to coordinate the distribution of work for a certain project or ask each other questions when something we're working on has leaked towards someone else's job or expertise...

but cake? seriously?

glory be

i have finally managed to properly change my permanent address. at this moment, i could have personal papers being delivered to any one of about 4 addresses...but hopefully not. gosh darn the USPS for being able to tell that the UPS store is not a residence, darn american express for their website almost NEVER working properly and darn those ghetto people (and/or my creepy-ass former neighbor) for being subhuman and insisting on running me out of my apartment in the first place, and thus causing the unfortunate situation with my mail.



(dear mom. guess where i've decided to live?)

de-press'-ing: adj 1: causing dejection; 2: causing or suggestive of sorrow or gloom;

I noticed something disturbing as I headed down Cedar Rd in the direction of campus this morning.

As you head west towards campus on Cedar, right up until you head down "the hill," you actually have a faily pleasent view of some of the buildings downtown. This morning, however, I noticed a diffused but very visible brown haze hovering around the downtown vista. It was particularly noticeable, i suppose, since today in cleveland we are enjoying one of those rare brilliant-blue-no-clouds days. on most days you probably can't see the pollution haze for the weather haze.

maybe i'm the only person who didn't know that cleveland does a good L.A. impression, but it should still be disturbing, even if you did know already. i never really had much cause to go the center of town anyway...

dana's right...really just gotta get out of the city.

procrastination

is it more evil for me to be procrastinating at my salary job (which i am doing presently) or at my hourly job? i could go either way.

i am procrastinating right now because i don't want to work on the prep for the upcoming department accreditation review. i think the review is in august, or thereabouts. i will spend all summer doing the most boring, tedious prep work i can presently imagine. all summer. i might take a brief break to prep for orientation, but then i will go back to photocopying, scanning and cataloguing every single piece of paper touched by each of several students in each of at least 10 required courses (if not more) this year. then i will catalogue the scans. then i will load the scans into what amounts to a giant linky wiki thing online that all the engr depts. are using. then i will data-enter a crap-ton of info about our department into said wiki-thing. then i will take all the scans and wiki docs and info and cross-reference them into freakin' infinity.

will the accreditation committee want to use the wiki/portal thing? no answer to that yet, but it seems to have been a fun project for some undergrad in comp sci to take a pre-made platform and build this thing with one of the comp sci profs, so i guess i will have to use it even though it may be entirely in vain.

however, none of the work is actually hard (just numbingly boring and tedious) and i'm being paid no-so-bad for completing it. and hey, if the mountain triples as soon as the semester ends (which i'm really afraid it might...the profs are total procrastination champs, even compared to me) maybe i'll get a little help or extra time out of it. i believe i set the stage for such things perfectly by casually announcing a couple of months ago that a huge ton of work is on its way down the pike in the near future. it made me seem very organized and on top of my job.

so far today i've typed a bunch of grant reviews (actual work), changed a billing address for a credit card, sent a friend of mine some baby gifts via target.com, changed of bunch of my online auto-savings schemes for my ing accounts and now need to buckle down and actually do something for the last 45 mins of the day, darnit.

is it nice outside yet? i heard it was supposed to be nice today, but i haven't seen daylight since i got to work this morning...darned interior office with no windows. i should get my headlight fixed and my oil changed today, but i think i'll postpone that until my friday afternoon break. i'm going to a meeting tomorrow after work, so today might be my only chance to view several continuous hours of sunshine. i really need to get the car work done, though...a nice lyndhurst sergeant pulled me over monday night because one of my headlights is out. good thing it was dark and he didn't notice that i'm driving around with only one license plate. ahem. he let me off with a warning and instructed me sternly to "take care of that." i totally need to move to lyndhurst if blown headlights are the worst thing the cops worry about at 11:30 at night.