Freight trains, dinosaurs, and second jobs

I had a job interview on Friday. No, I'm not leaving the museum, but I applied some time ago for part-time job as a vet technician for Second Chance animal sanctuary. They're a no-kill shelter for cats and dogs rescued from Animal Control.

I did the math and realized I haven't done any vet work in 19 years. I wish I could dig up some photos of me on the job at the old Timberlyne Animal Clinic in Chapel Hill in 1992. I'll see what I can dig up. Anyway... I learned it all from scratch on the job the first time, I figured I could pick it up again pretty easily, and I've been wanting to do some work that would "give back" to the community in some way. This way I could give back and get paid for it at the same time. I guess that sort of blows the whole concept of giving back, but at this stage in my life, it would be helpful to get paid to Do Good.

I met Jack, who runs the place, and the first thing he asked me was "Why on Earth do you want this job?"

I guess that should have been a clue that things were a bit off. But I talked with him for 15 minutes or so before I realized I was interviewing for something completely different than I thought I was. Somehow my resumé got put in the stack of interviews for a full-time office manager position, which of course I'm qualified to do... rather over-qualified, I like to think ... but there's no way I could manage and keep my current job, which Jack mentioned. It was at this point that I realized the mix up and told him I was there for the tech job.

"Ooooooh! Man!" He said, "I just hired a bunch of techs last week! You would have been perfect!"

Sigh. Well. The bad news is I didn't get the job. The good news is that I'm hopefully a shoe-in when another tech position opens up... whenever that is. In the meantime, I may try to get out there and do some volunteer work. The animals looked at me so eagerly when I drove up. They all seemed to be saying "Take me Home!" There was one black kitty in particular. He looked like Skeezix (the long-haired black cat Gray and I had that now lives with him), but he had one eye. I would name him Odin, and take pictures of him in a big slouchy hat.

I'm inspired to get a second job because I want to speed up the pay-off time on my debts. I paid off one big credit card bill with my tax refund, but I'd like to get all the rest of the debt paid off as soon as possible so I can get fit to buy a house in a couple of years. Last week Bob told me he got the official letter from his last creditor: he is now officially and completely debt free. I would like to know what that feels like. I started racking up debt in 1992 when I put lein on my parents' van to pay for my last semester of graduate school and I've never really paid it off. That loan got rolled into something else that got rolled into something else, and essentially I've been paying off one long loan since I was about 23. I'd say 20 years of debt is enough.

Things are busy and hectic right now, so I'm pretty glad at present that I don't have a second job. The one I have is wearing me out.

I pulled two twelve-hour days last week: Tuesday for a trade show for which at least I had good company (my compadre and dear friend Michael from the Fred Jones museum whose company always makes work light); and Thursday to emcee a Wine and Chocolate event that got postponed from the week before due to the crazy weather. This is the third "Wine and (fill in the blank)" event I've emceed, and though they are fun, they are exhausting. It's like being the host of a party, only with a microphone, and you have to be all smiley and chipper and jolly everyone along. It is fun, and it makes me feel like I must be really charming and witty, though probably people are just being nice. It wears me out, however, especially at the end of an already long and busy day.

Yesterday wasn't a twelve hour day, but it felt like one. We announced a new dinosaur at the museum, and I spent all afternoon shuttling reporters up to the vertebrate paleontology collection to interview the curator. (click here to learn more about the dinosaur!)Today was more of the same all through the morning, partly for the dinosaur news and partly for media previews of the new permanent exhibit we're building (Black Mesa).

All in all, the past week or so felt like a freight train. Heavy and moving fast. I'm afraid I no longer thrive on that sort of pace the way I did when I was younger. I like to stay busy, but I no longer have to prove how many flaming swords I can juggle. I'm old and wise enough now to realize that juggling flaming swords is highly overrated and exhausting, and everybody's way more interested in the swords than in your skill at juggling. In fact, mostly nobody notices you're juggling them at all unless you drop one.

I wanted to get more photos and stuff in this post, but it has taken me three days just to get it finished, so I'll leave it as is for now. I'm too tired to be witty or graphically interesting. I'll try to be wittier next time around.

The Awful Truth Below the Snow

The weather has truly broken now, I believe. The temperature was back up to a perfectly wonderful 65 degrees this weekend, and everything is drippy and squashy and muddy. There are slushy snowmounds in the parking lots and on the shady side of houses -- which happens to be the front yard, in our case. This morning there were three squirrels in our back yard, frantically bouncing around the lawn, burying nuts. I don't know why they are burying them this time of year, but it's what they were all doing: springing about and manically burying nuts. I thought they did that in the fall but... oh well.

It was so lovely out on Saturday afternoon that I went out with my book and dragged a chair out into the sun to enjoy the warmth and vitamin-D and a good lazy read.

Roxy had other ideas.

Roxy had uncovered her red rubber ball and stood with her face inches from my knees and made ultra-sonic squeaking noises until I relented and got up to throw the ball for her. It's irritating at first, but it makes her so deliriously happy that I have to forgive her for interrupting my peaceful reading time.

At one point the ball ricocheted off the sycamore tree and disappeared into a heap of leaves that have fetched up along the chainlink fence in the back corner of the yard, and even Roxy's supernatural sense of BALL couldn't help her find it, so I sauntered over to dig it out for her.

And uncovered Hell.

I forgot that I hadn't been out to scoop the poop since before Christmas. The entire back corner of my yard was a solid mass of dog turds. Dog turds upon dog turds upon dog turds, in every stage of freshness: from just-this-morning to fossilized to pulverized. I was utterly horrified.

A short exploration across the lawn revealed two other similarly godforsaken locations. So: bye bye relaxing doze in the sunshine. I had to go get my shovel and get scoopin'. I scooped for over an hour (with frequent interruptions by Roxy who would bring me the ball and pester me until I laid aside the shovel to throw for her), and scooped up two tall kitchen garbage pails full of poop. And that was just triage. This weekend I'll have to go out and do it all over again, with an eye to the finer detail, not just damage control.

A little about dog poop. My dogs each have a particular style and a particular place they like to go. Kobi likes to stay in cover. Tall grass or ground cover are her preferred spots. Flower leaves a trail of enormous turds. She's a squat-and-walker. Roxy's contributions are always easily identifiable. First of all, Roxy eats a lot of unnatural objects, so her poops are often colorful: they were all full of blue blanket bits for awhile. But her new blanket is purple, so the hue has changed. Roxy is also something of a soft-serve specialist. She creates, as Grayson puts it: "fancy poops."

I realize this is way more than you wanted to know about dog poop, but it was something I made a rather full study of yesterday afternoon, so it's on my mind.

Also, I'm painfully reminded of all that shoveling today as my muscles begin to stiffen up from the unaccustomed work. My neck, arms and shoulders are really protesting. I'm a little bit afraid that by bedtime I'll have turned into the Tinman. I see ibuprofen in my future.

Eye of the Storm

Back to work today... like normal people. Amazing how pathetically exhausting work can be when you've been in Snow Mode for a week. I flailed miserably, like a newborn kitten...no, like a newborn panda: blind and floppy and driven by sheer instinct.

Okay, it wae sn't that bad... but I felt out of my depth. And now I learn that more "weather" is on the way. Yes, Snowmageddon II (if you're not as utterly sick of that term, then you don't live in Oklahoma) is on its way: another apocalyptic snow storm, due to hit on Tuesday evening and to smite us mightily through Wednesday. So now we're faced with a host of decisions regarding upcoming events: to cancell now, based on impending Weather Doom? Or to tough it out, believing that Oklahoma will pull another meteorological hat trick.

I have said on a coupe of occasions lately that "I never have felt like a grown-up." It always gets a laugh when I say it... but it's absolutely true. God help me if I ever have to make real decisions. Most of the time I'm just flying by the seat of my pants. Surely grown-ups have more planning going on than I do. I don't know. I guess I never will.

Snow Days

I don't know why anyone is surprised by the vicissitudes of Oklahoma's winter weather. We should be taking wild fluctuations in temperature and extremes of precipitation in stride by now. The past four years have each handed us at least one bizarre Act of God between Christmas and St. Patty's day. Apocalyptic ice storms, temperatures plunging into the single digits, and now the latest: Thunder Snow. I don't know if Tuesday's snowstorm was more intense than last year's Christmas Eve Blizzard, but it has been much more long-lasting. Four days of frozen snow, and more yesterday, astonishingly enough.

That in itself is unusual. Typically, Oklahoma dumps its snow load once and then it vanishes within a few days. But it has been brutally cold this week: too cold to even enjoy going out to play in the snow. Grayson and I have been holed up inside, curled into our individual well-worn pockets of the sofa, inert. G's been watching cartoons on the computer and I've been reading and doing some mosaic work, until I ran out of blue tiles.

I'm becoming a bit inert. The less I do, the less I feel capable of doing. Soon I'll begin to turn into a form of semi-sapient jello.

Fortunately, the sun returned today, and I see the icicles lengthening on the patio cover. I believe the snow will be gone by this time tomorrow. Back to our regular Oklahoma winter programming. Hot and cold.

Today, I'm seriously considering rounding up a group of people to go throw snowballs at the Westboro Baptist Church. This twisted paean to religious insanity is picketing the funeral of a 20-year-old Moore woman killed in a sledding accident this week, because "God Hates Oklahooma." Well, of course, their god hates everything but them, apparently, but it's nice to know he has a special hate reserved for Oklahoma because Oklahoman welcomed His People by slashing their tires last time they showed up in Moore. And no garages would agree to fix them.

Soooo, they're back, to thumb their noses at our Godforsaken state and further break the hearts of the girl's poor family. I know they're not worth the effort it would take to spit on them, but I do feel a certain pride in Oklahoma being singled out by the nutjobs. Oklahoma suffers from its own brand of fundamentalism, but at least we don't welcome the truly insane.

The funeral is at 1:15... and the snow should be melted to the perfect consistency for really great snowballs....

I can't decide if it is worse to cause a melee at this person's funeral, or to allow this nutjob "church" to pull off another publicity stunt on Oklahoma soil unaccosted. Hmmmm.... think, think, think.