oh, why not?

I seem to have ODitis lately. I want to write, I’d like to write, I NEED to write, yet I find a gazillion things to do instead. Like, oh, pinning things on Pinterest. Do you know about Pinterest?? It sounds kind of silly, but believe me, it goes from "hmmmm, I don’t quite get the point of this…." to "OMG CAN NOT STOP PINNING!!!!!" in about five minutes. Or seconds. You pin stuff from the interwebs onto your own virtual "boards", which can be whatever you would like them to be. Places you’ve been to, ideas you’d like to try, music you love, videos you can’t get enough of… etc etc. Home improvement and crafty boards are very popular. I of course have ruins and doors and windows and houses I really want to move into and places I want to go in general and places I want to go on future England Trips in particular and things that would be my style if I actually had a style at all. You can pin stuff you’ve found yourself with a handy little pinning button that attaches right to your bookmarks bar, or you can re-pin things from other Pinterest people. You have "followers", which is kind of ego-boosting. And you follow other people. And when you start, you.can.not.stop.

Here’s mine. If you’re already there, let me know, and I’ll be your faithful follower! If you are not there, they are still at the stage where you have to request an invitation to join. You just sign up and they email you an invitation. I thought it was taking a couple of weeks to receive the invite, but it only took two or three days to get mine. I’m not sure when this all started up but it hasn’t been long. You can sign up with your Facebook account and it will (kind of oddly) automatically suggest you follow all your FB friends who are already there. I have managed to blur mine by signing up as Edna Million then using my FB account to sign in so my real name is also my user name (although I did take off my last name) which also means  I’m letting all my FB friends know I’m  Edna Million, at least if they notice my URL. Actually my Flickr account is Edna Million too. Oh, well, as someone said not long ago, if you are that concerned about privacy, get off the internet. 

SO. That’s what I’ve been up to lately. Along with work being really really REALLY busy. Mostly because Mr. Organized and I decided we should start doing graduation audits automatically, like most of the other colleges do, instead of having students come in and request them individually. It will cut way down on the foot traffic, and will also make sure everyone gets an audit, which is pretty important since it’s a little more insurance that they’ll find out about any grave shortages before it’s too late to do anything about it. So we ran a spreadsheet of all the students who have senior standing, and are working our way through it. The problem is there isn’t a way to weed out the ones who have enough hours to graduate, but have switched majors or dilly-dallied around so much that they are still far from graduation, so are too early for an audit to be helpful. And a lot of them have not declared a minor or are following a different checksheet than what’s in the system, or have taken stuff that’s not on their checksheet and their advisors haven’t sent memos approving it… my point is, that’s the downside of not having them coming in person – they don’t fill out paperwork that makes sure they tell us these specific things. 

Of course Aggravation Receptionist was the one who usually took their audit request forms, and most of the time she wouldn’t make sure they filled it out correctly so we’d be missing this vital stuff anyhow.

SO our solution was to send out a mass email to everyone on the list, letting them know that they have enough hours for an audit, and asking them to please check their online records and make sure we have all this vital information. And to also let us know if they really aren’t graduating in the next semester or two so we can hold off on their till later. And we also noted (not in great big letters, unfortunately, but hey, live and learn) that if they’d already HAD an audit, they would not get another one, so PLEASE disregard the email if that’s the case! 

Of course we immediately got ten zillion calls and emails saying, "I already had an audit! What do I need to do???"

Really, though, I’ve been kind of surprised and VERY pleased at how many replies I’ve gotten that tell me exactly what I asked them to tell me — what their minor is, what checksheet year they are really following, or that they are actually not graduating for three more semesters so don’t do theirs yet. It’s pretty darned heartwarming to get so many responses that prove they CAN read and follow directions! And since this is not about stuff they are missing, like the You’re Not Graduating!!!!! letters, nobody is angry or whiny or upset, and most of them are very appreciative. It’s refreshingly painless. 

Well, except that there were, seriously, like nine hundred emails, which means a WHOLE LOT OF REPLIES. So for the past two weeks I’ve been trying to stay on top of all these replies and questions and updates, since I am Keeper of the Spreadsheet. In the future this should be much easier — we’ll have flagged the ones who already had an audit (there was no way to do that on this first go-round without going through the actual physical files, which was WAY too time-consuming). Again, whole point being that it’s a LOT of work this time. A lot of extra work, which will of course pay off in future semesters, but right now is a little overwhelming. 

And of course Aggravation Receptionist came down with strep throat and felt it her duty to share all her germs with us, so all week I’ve been convinced I have strep throat too! Despite the complete and total lack of the really major signs, like, oh, a sore throat. Since it takes a week to materialize (according to AR, at least, and she should know because she is an expert on illness thanks to her constant internet research of symptoms and diseases. And her husband had it first and it took her a week to get sick) I guess I still could be stricken, and I also fear being a carrier. So didn’t go visit my old dear friend and her mom this weekend like I wanted to, for fear I’d give her very fragile mom a case of strep throat. Pretty much the very last thing she needs right now. She has advanced dementia and S is her caretaker .It’s been horrifically difficult and exhausting for her, and I haven’t seen her in ages. Maybe next weekend. 

And in final Big News, Baker B and I decided today that we really need to move. We need to sell this house and buy a house that is NOT a fixer-upper. Because we are not people who are able to fix things. And we do not have the money to pay someone else to do it. A lot of what this house needs is cosmetic – paint, new carpet, new cabinets, new counters, new, oh, EVERYTHING– and yeah, we really could do it ourselves but we are TERRIBLE at DYI, and we HATE it, to the point we just put off everything until it’s a crisis. So our house looks like absolute hell, and it’s kind of depressing. And overwhelming to look around at all that needs to be done. And some of it is serious, like the bathroom window that’s going to fall in soon. Well, the whole outside WALL is going fall in if we don’t do something. A hunk of the tile has already fallen in, and the drywall is rotting. Yeah, that is serious. And we HAVE done what feels like a lot. We stained the deck a few months ago, we put up new gutters in the spring, we had a new roof put on a couple of years ago (after the leaks got so bad we were starting to need buckets when it rained), we had the entire house jacked up five years ago which cost a metric fuck-ton of money but kept it from falling off the mountain. 

So we’ve actually done a lot but it’s nothing compared to what still needs to be done. And although normally it would not make sense to sell a house without fixing up at least the cosmetic stuff, we paid so little for this house (hello, fixer-upper!!) that it’s valued at way more than we paid. And our neighbor, the Senator From The Dark Side, is Mr. Fixer Upper, and right now has two houses that he’s fixed up and now rents in our neighborhood. One beside us, one across the road. So we’re kind of thinking he would be all for buying this one, fixing it up, and renting it. He’s already turned this end of the neighborhood into student rentals, yet ANOTHER reason to get the hell out of here while we can. The current batch is astonishingly quiet and well-behaved, but one of the many problems with students is constant turnover. 

The biggest reason, though, is that we’ve been seriously considering a reverse mortgage after we retire. We’ll have it paid off in ten years or so, and we don’t have kids to worry about leaving it to. And the more money a house is worth, the more you’ll get on a reverse mortgage, of course.

For some reason this has all just occurred to us today. So we drove around house-looking. Although this area has not been hit as badly by the housing disaster (except Miss Artsy, a story for another day) it’s still a buyers market and I think we could afford a pretty decent house. A small, not-a-fixer-upper house. And the great thing is that there’s no rush- we can take our time and just start looking around, and perhaps broach the subject with Senator From The Dark Side. It’s certainly an exciting idea. 

Wow, I really should make more entries, so that they don’t end up being a novel. Okay, time to go pack my lunch.