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Saturday, July 05, 2008

personalization

I painted the master bathroom lavender today. That was great fun. It occurs to me that I have never lived any place where the walls weren't white (aside from the paneling in the den), and having come to that realization I am now quite likely to go a little overboard with color on my walls. But not too far overboard, because I am well aware most of the rooms in my house don't really get enough natural light to stand for being any color other than white, or maybe pastel.

My sister swears that the paneling in the den makes that room way too dark and gloomy, and I should paint it or replace it with sheetrock. I think that both of those options are more ambitious projects than I'm really prepared to handle at this point, not least because the paneling wraps all the way around the kitchen--behind the kitchen cabinets--and there's no really good point to leave off the new wall treatment. Anyway, I just turn the lights on and open the curtains, and then the room seems adequately bright to me.

Painting the bathroom a color my mother would never have chosen may also be a sign that I really believe this is my house now, and not Mom and Dad's house.

Friday, July 04, 2008

Do you think you are (or you would be) a better parent than your own parents? Why or why not?

It might be just possible to find better parents than my mom and dad were, but I think there's no way I could be better at it. Mostly because I don't have the inclination for it, but then, I don't know if they did, really; getting married and having kids was just what people did, back when Mom and Dad got together in the late 1940s.

That may be unfair, though. Mom told me once she was pretty thrilled when I was born, when she was 40 and thought she couldn't get pregnant any more, and she was all set to have another one after me if her doctor hadn't ruled against it. So I guess she really did actively want kids. She would have made a terrific Grandma, and I always thought it was a damn shame she didn't see more of her one and only grandchild, who lived (and still does) halfway across the country. And Mom gravitated towards little kids whenever she was out in public.

Once we were having dinner with our contractor in Colorado. His kids were young at the time, and Mom was talking to the younger one, the little girl. Instead of asking, "How old are you?" she said, "Are you this many?" and held up three fingers. Mom knew how to talk to kids.

I don't. Didn't care for them much when I was one, either; I always gravitated to grownups, and at least once I had to be told to run off and play with the kids my age. I suspect Mom always thought that that was something I'd grow out of, as my sister had, and I'd start to be interested in kids when I was older, but I never did.

Dad was more of a hands-off kind of parent when I was little; he went to work at The Office every day, and left me to Mom. We got closer when I got older, though, and I'm glad to know he was proud of the way I turned out.

Mostly it doesn't occur to me that they're gone, but I do miss them sometimes when I think about it.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

pinball

I was looking at News of the Weird Daily, as I generally do most days, and saw a snippet about a couple in North Carolina charged with assault, kidnapping, and Satanism.

I used to subscribe to the Raleigh News and Observer when I lived in Chapel Hill, so I clicked on the link to their story about it. One of their top headlines from the last seven days was "Man jumps from Chapel Hill restaurant," so I had a look at that and then checked out the N&O's main Orange County page, that being the county Chapel Hill is in.

There I saw a story about resurfacing Amber Alley, which included the remark that the slippery terra cotta finish of the alley was almost as famous as the alley's former tenant, the Ramshead Rathskeller restaurant.

At which point I said "Former tenant??"

I didn't know the Rat had closed. Man, that makes me sad. Somewhere in the house I've got a Rathskeller matchbook, which I had taken as a souvenir last time I ate there, some time in the 90s before I moved back to Louisiana. I didn't go there often, considering I lived in Chapel Hill for eight years, but it was a memorable experience every time.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

learning curve

I learned some things about being a manager this week. One was that I really ought to have everybody's phone number stored in my phone, or at least have a list somewhere at home as well as at work. The big thing, though, is that I learned I am inevitably going to screw up a lot of things the first time the situation arises.

The trick is not screwing the same thing up the next time.

I have the weekend off, and the coworker who called in sick today arranged for somebody to cover for her before I even heard about it, so things are looking pretty good for the moment.

Maybe I can persuade myself to paint the bathroom this weekend. I've been neglecting a lot of stuff I know I need to do around the house, but I think I'm about to reach the point where it annoys me more to put it off than to buckle down and do it.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

decision, of sorts

I guess the real sign that I meant to apply for the promotion, before I knew I meant to or had admitted it to anybody, is that last week I delegated one of my favorite things to do: ordering movies. The requests and the catalogs had been piling up, and I had gone from putting in orders at least once a week to maybe getting around to it every third week. So I split it up between a couple of other librarians in my department, so I'd have time to concentrate on selecting books for all the branches.

Now if I don't get the promotion, the job I'll be going back to won't be quite the same one I did before, and it won't be as fun as before either. That would suck.