currently in ednaland

First of all, thank you all SO much for the notes about Stella. Nothing really makes you feel better… but that made me feel better. If that makes sense. We’re still sad and moping around and Eddie goes downstairs and calls her, which is just the saddest thing ever. But at least she wasn’t in pain and we had her months longer than we thought we were going to when she first got sick.

Now, on to some currents. Since currents can be counted on to get me to write when nothing else seems to.

Current happy thought: That it’s Friday night. Yippie! It’s about damn time, that’s for sure. This has been the longest week EVER. We’ve been very very busy at work and just got even busier with the arrival at last of our new report listing the students who have applied to graduate in December. Considering that the Registrar’s Office has just this semester implemented a totally online application system, and has made about a gazillion major changes in how everything is done, and did not consult any of us who actually do the clearing of the seniors as to how the process actually works on our end, I am anticipating much disaster. Especially since we had way way fewer students on our list than we should have, and it did not include people who had moved their applications from previous semesters (I keep a spreadsheet, lucky for us, so I know who moved and when they moved to) and it also apparently left off students who are graduating with two degrees, and usually by this time in the semester we’re half done and not just starting….yeah, it’s already not looking pretty. And I won’t keep going on about it since I’m sure nobody knows what the hell I’m talking about, and also, hellllloo!! Friday night!!! Time to not think about work!!!

Current irritation: Well, I just moved from my laptop to Baker B’s desktop because suddenly the fuckity fucking cursor was jumping around and I several times lost BLOCKS of what I’d just written– which bizarrely reappeared when I smacked the enter key, which yeah, should not be smacking… okay, it’s doing the same thing on his desktop. What the hell???!!??? Is it OD?? Is it Chrome?? Just switched to Firefox. Let’s see if that works, or if I’m just going to have to give up. It actually is a little bit of a relief that it’s doing the same thing on the desktop, since I’ve had weird occasional problems with the laptop cursor and touchpad before. Never enough to go get it checked out; just enough to irritate the fuck out of me once in awhile.

It seems fine now. How weird. Maybe it IS Chrome.

Current anticipation: It’s Oz Weekend! It is a kind of bittersweet anticipation, though. They’ve made some major changes (are they in cahoots with the Registrar’s Office???) and now you can only go through the house and down the Yellow Brick Road once, and it also sounds like you can’t walk up the mountain to the park anymore. They’ve got the food and vendors down below, in the little town, instead of up on the mountain at Oz. You have to buy tickets for specific times now. So instead of walking up the mountain (about a mile, very pretty walk) to the park, and going through the house and down the Yellow Brick Road three or four times, and hanging out as long as we wanted… we have to take transportation up and have tickets checked and only go through once. It’s crowd control- it was actually so crowded the last few years that we only went through twice anyhow. The lines were awful. We can ride the chair lift up, which will be fun (it’s a ski resort in the winter). And I think we can walk back down. We’re going Sunday because I waited too long to buy tickets, and it was sold out Saturday morning. Which of course is going to be the warm sunny day. Oh, well. Last year we didn’t go— it was the first year we’d missed in like FIFTEEN YEARS. Because it was below freezing, with 40 mile an hour winds. We totally wimped out. So it will still be fun, no matter that they’ve made all these changes we don’t approve of.

Current surprise: Hearing something that sounded like thumping a few minutes ago, looking out the door to the deck… and seeing fireworks! Fireworks right in front of me, on the hill right across from the back of our house, where they are building the gargantuan monster apartment complex which will consist of 109 little cabins with nearly a THOUSAND parking places. Meaning there will be, oh, A THOUSAND MORE CARS trying to get out onto the four-lane in the morning, where there is no traffic light and you already can’t turn left unless you want to back up the traffic behind you for an hour while you wait for a chance to turn. Which believe me, people do every single morning. I can not imagine how awful it will be with a thousand more students. Okay, I am exaggerating a teeny bit since there will be 894 beds and 971 parking spaces. Hopefully they won’t all be leaving at the same time I am in the morning. But it is still going to be a nightmare. On the plus side, it’s "cottages" instead of a high-rise, so it won’t be as visually ugly.

But I have careened way way off from my original point, which was that I had an amazing view of fireworks out the back door, which I assume is because they have basically stripped the top of the mountain, giving us a view of things like fireworks from the university’s stadium, when in the past we could only see flashes lighting up the sky just out of sight. So that was pretty exciting. I didn’t even know they were having fireworks tonight, but it’s homecoming weekend. I can also see fires where they are burning debris from the clearing. This is one of the rare times I’m glad we don’t have a view — too many trees blocking it– because we can only see teeny spots of the stripped mountainside. I bet we hear the parties, though. Yay, college town.

Current TV: Our current addiction is Doc Martin. As much as we love British TV, I have no idea how it’s taken us this long to discover Doc Martin – it’s been on since 2004, and has aired in the US too. It’s about a very successful and very socially inept London vascular surgeon who suddenly develops a debilitating aversion to blood. So he moves to Cornwall and becomes the general practitioner in a little fishing town there. Full of quirky characters and gorgeous gorgeous scenery. It’s hilarious and very touching. Doc Martin is kind of like House, except less friendly. Or like Bernard in Black Books without the booze and the cigarettes and the sidekicks. He actually appears to have mild Aspergers. If you haven’t seen it, you need to go get it from Netflix right this minute.

Current music: I’m shuffling the iPod, but it just played this:

The Residents- Jambalaya. Yes, that Jambalaya. That cheery happy Creole song! Which, and only The Residents could do this, is now creepy and dark and frightening! I think it may be my favorite Residents song.

Well, I like Gingerbread Man a lot too.

The Residents are really peculiar. Baker B is a huge fan. Nobody knows who they really are or what they actually look like.

This is what they say they look like:

And that’s enough currents. Oh, wait, one more:

What it currently looks like around here:

Bass Lake, yesterday evening after work:

That’s lilly pads all over the lake. I think they’ve kind of gotten out of control in the last few years.

We don’t ordinarily have lots of swans here, but the resort next to this lake has quite a few, and apparently a couple of them have relocated-