You're Doing It Wrong

The reason I took this picture was because of that little pink flower in the midst of all the dying stuff. But it didn’t turn out as interesting as I thought it would be.

I’m doing a photo project of my neighbor’s tree. I’ve been taking a photo of it (almost) daily since October 11. I missed a few days and the time change totally messed me up because I am not home during daylight on workdays now. I’m still taking night photos which I don’t think are going to work.

I have a mouthpiece thing that I wear at night for teeth grinding. It has helped a lot so I recommend although it does take a bit to get used to it.

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and noticed I didn’t have it. It was made specifically for my teeth so it clicks into place. While I was half asleep and not wanting to wake myself up too much, I tried to remember whether I was wearing when I went to bed and I was certain that I was.

Then I started wondering if I could have swallowed it without waking up. I don’t think I could swallow even if I wanted to but it was gone and there was a lightning fast mental progression of what it would be like for this thing to travel through my digestive system.

I finally turned on the light and found it in the bed. (Your guess is as good as mine.) I put it back in its plastic dish and we’ll try again tonight.

I don’t know how I’m going to make it for 30 days. I’m already phoning it in and it’s the weekend.

What the hell with these things? I had to buy a new hair dryer. AGAIN. Because nowadays they only make them to last a year. And it came with this thing.

I understand the principle of diffusing but does it actually work? Because to me it just kept grazing my scalp in an unpleasant way and it was like a neighbor was trying to blow out birthday candles on my head and not like my hair was getting dried.

I saved my money from my jobs to buy that receiver. I started babysitting when I was 13 and I worked at Jack-in-the-Box when I was 16.

My Dad took me to the stereo store and I think I got the receiver, a turntable and speakers. I didn’t get the most expensive thing but it cost real money. Not like all the cheap crap there is now. And look, it’s lasted over 30 years.

KMET was the hard rock station that was my favorite. Later it turned into a New Age music station which was a huge tragedy. Do they have “New Age” music anymore?

You know when you go into old people’s houses and they look like they haven’t changed anything for 30 years? And when you’re young you wonder what is wrong with these people. And when you’re old you realize that changing things takes time and energy and if you’re fine with the old things, why change?

That’s how it is at our house. It’s not even the money, although that’s part of it. It’s taking the time to change things. We’d always rather be doing something else.

I am a notary in the state of Oregon. I have been a notary since 1992 and I’m only on page 9 of my Notary Book. That means I don’t notarize very often.

You need a notary in a law office but in the case of our office, very rarely.

At the end of the summer I was looking for something in my desk and I noticed my notary stamp and I thought, “Oh hey, I haven’t notarized anything in forever. I wonder when my commission expires.”

Well, it expired 18 months earlier.

Oops. To save money Oregon no longer tells you when you expire and if you don’t renew before the expiration date, you have to do a 3 hour online training course. It was sort of a pain but I did learn a lot.

They tell you that when your commission expires you’re supposed to destroy your old stamp. Destroy it, what are you supposed to do? Get a sledgehammer?

The online training course, which is conducted by a robot voice, addresses this very question and says, “You do not have to get a sledgehammer to destroy your notary stamp.”

You can just peel of the stamp off and cut it with scissors.

Is backing-in, as in to a parking spot, a thing now? A local thing? Just a coincidence?

I’ve noticed at the park-n-ride we’re now at about half the cars backing in to their spots. I guess I can see how at the end of the day, it would be nice to just pull out to leave. But I don’t find backing out all that onerous.

On Friday I was at the market and about a third of the cars were backed-in including a car backing in as I arrived. The person driving was a 20-ish young woman who was wearing pajama pants.

Really? You’re willing to take the time and trouble to back your car in at a mostly empty parking lot, but not to put on a pair of pants?

I can’t remember if I ever told the story. This is my office but there was remodeling next door and now people use the adjacent office. The walls are made out of whatever it is that transmits sound best. The people next door have a talking job. I have a thinking job and when they are talking I can’t think. I moved my desk into the main room.

That’s not the story. The story is that at the beginning of last month I cleaned out the vendor files in my old desk and I noticed some shredded paper along the top of some of the file folders. Sort of like a mouse would do.

Except why would there be a mouse on the 10th floor of a well-maintained office building?

I assumed the shredding must have happened with opening and closing the drawer and didn’t think about it again.

Last week I was in the office by myself (because all the strange stuff happens when I’m in the office by myself) and I was sitting at my old desk. I looked up and here was Mr. Brown Mouse trotting purposefully right at me.

He saw me, and if mice have facial expressions his was, uh oh, and he turned around and slipped into the utility room. The utility room is where the copier and supplies are.

After about thirty seconds of, huh, that’s different, I went and shut the utility room door and phoned building management and 5 minutes later I had 3 people from the maintenance staff in there seeing if they could catch it.

They didn’t find anything and arranged for pest control to return the next day and they left.

Of course I have all kinds of snacks in my office so I looked through it all – nothing looked like it had been snacked on. There were no signs of mice anywhere.

The next day I remembered I had a bag of chocolates in the drawer above the shredded paper drawer and I checked and sure enough, Mr. Mouse had been having a good time in that bag. I also have an extra pair of socks in my desk because my feet get cold and he’d done a number on those, too.

Traps have been set. Hopefully when I go in on Monday they will have captured him and taken him to live on a farm out by Scappoose.