Knitting Cybrarian

The Wedding Singer

Well, I was one of the wedding singers today.  I was in pretty good voice today.  I drank lots of water, not as much coffee/dairy and skipped lunch to help it along.  Nothing like a burp coming on  when you take a deeeeeeep breath!

You may wonder, what does a wedding singer wear?  I have to tell you that I LOVE being a musician in the Episcopal Church.  Why?  Because clothing choices aren't much of an issue.  Since I wear vestments over my street clothes, I just need to make sure that my top doesn't show and that my skirt/pants, socks/stockings and shoes are black.  Easy for this pianist and singer who owns lots of black dress clothes.

The service went well, and when I sang the first song, the bride and groom turned to watch me sing (I was at the back of the church next to the piano).  Wow.  My heart leapt and I prayed that I would give them and God my very best blessings on their marriage.  What fun!

How to annoy me

It's been quite a week so far.  I thought I'd document how one can annoy me-- true examples sampled from this week.

• Talk/present/argue with one's eyes shut.  Eye contact, please.  If you want to annoy me even more, talk to me while looking at my chest.  Neither is an effective communication technique.
• Interrupt and/or talk over me or a colleague during a discussion.  I'm not impressed and I'm not easily intimidated.  When one employs this communication strategy, I'm inclined to consider the speaker a bully.  Again, this is not an effective communication technique.
• Tell my university colleagues that you think "librarians just check out books.  That's ALL they do." and then expect me to respond to a Byzantine request for your unit in a heartbeat.  I'm inclined to respond to the request in Russian (using Cyrillic script, not a transliteration) just because I can.
• Ask me to violate by-laws and/or rules or ask me to ask another group to violate those rules to further your political agenda.  You've asked me my opinion, I gave it, and no, I won't tell you what you want to hear.
• Ask me favors, write me notes, write me e-mail and refer to me by an incorrect name.  If you can find my e-mail address, find my office, find my phone number, then you can read my name.  I have come up with some humdingers for people who messed up my name in the past.  Like the choral director who kept calling me "Linda" until I called him "Mr. Roach." 

Who knows what Friday will bring?!??!
Sadly, I could go on.

I'm in love

with a Firefox extension called Morning Coffee.  Why? 

Every morning, as I drink my coffee, I visit a number of websites.  Morning Coffee opens all of those sites for me in separate tabs (or windows if I wanted).  I can even set it to which sites I want to visit on specific days, although I'm not that fancy.

So if your morning habits are like mine, give it a go.  Certainly makes one aspect of waking up much easier!

Hey! Good news!

Pass me that strawberry margarita.  It's healthy!  Really!

Evening snack, anyone?

Crazy week so far.  This evening I worked at the yarn store, worked late and came home after 9pm.  The hubster went to bed, and here I sit, working on handouts for a knitting retreat Saturday.  Portia went outside a few moments ago, and I heard her scratch at the screen.

Often I would just let her in without looking closely, but when I looked towards the door, I noticed something dark in her mouth.  She's snagged a mousie and is desperate to bring it in, show it off, and then finish it off.  She's quite distressed that while I vocally praise her, I won't let her in. 

Now she'll finish it off, eat a little and probably want in.  I'm not looking forward to cleaning up her barfed up mouse in the night.

Snack, anyone?

The unbelievable

I grew up in small town Virginia, in a rural county where dairy farming and apple and peach orchards dominated the local economy along with woodworking and textile industries.

Two of my cousins went to Virginia Tech to major in agriculture, or the "cow college" as some of us teased them about it.  Ag school wasn't easy.  One of my other cousins went to UVa for undergrad and I went there for one of my grad degrees.  For some of us, college was not a given.  Not because of smarts, but because of money.  We worked and went anyway.  My first two years of college, one of my cousins and I went to Bluefield College and we'd pass Virginia Tech on our drive up US 460 to Bluefield.  My cousin Richard wasn't in school there yet, but a fair number of our high school classmates who went on to college attended Tech. 

Later on, another cousin moved to Christiansburg, down the road from Tech, and met his wife, who worked at Tech.  Yesterday's news hit our family hard.  We all have ties to Tech, and my immediate thoughts were for my cousin's wife, who stills works at Tech.  I contacted another cousin, who called his sister-in-law's father, and verified that she and her husband were fine.

While I'm relieved and thankful beyond belief at the news, I couldn't help but watch the news and wonder.  Some of the injured were taken to Roanoke Memorial Hospital, one of the few trauma centers in that area of Virginia.  One of my high school classmates is a trauma surgeon at Roanoke Memorial and was my father's surgeon.  I asked for blessings on Al as he performed surgery on these young people.  I asked for prayers for the parents, families and friends of these young people -- knowing that some of those young folks might be children of high school classmates.

While part of me wants to know why Why WHY?  I also know that people snap.  People make decisions that aren't rational, that make no sense, and that have permanent consequences and leave indelible tracks on other's lives and on history.  I can ask for peace, for forgiveness and healing.  And pray no one tries to "top this one." 

The B word

I went for an eye appointment yesterday.  My glasses are waaaay out of focus for me now, and I want an alternative for days when I don't feel like sticking hard plastic discs in my eyes.  My appointment was for 2:15pm and I'm glad I made it that early, 'cause I didn't get home until nearly 5pm.

I went to a different doc than last year -- we have a new vision insurance plan at work, and my former doc wasn't in that plan.  I got the full workup yesterday, including dilating my eyes and having bright lights focused on my eyes while sitting up and while reclining.  Whoa. 

The even more fun part was the optical department.  A black plastic sheet on one side of the hallway hid renovation -- the noise was deafening at times and I felt for the staff who had to work in that environment!

Oh, the B word?  BIFOCALS.  The one contact that does the close up work got ramped up a notch and my new glasses will have progressive lenses.  The joys of post-40 living.

Maria, the wonderfully patient optician, helped me pick out frames.  Mostly because I couldn't see worth a hoot up close.  I could make out my reflection in the mirror from several feet away, but with the dilated eyes, I wasn't much help.  My favorite frames were a little too snug, but my next favorite ones were in her words "a little edgy."  I like edgy.  I was really impressed -- I told her what I liked, what I didn't like and she came up with great choices quickly.

Unfortunately the whole operation had migrated to a new computer system.  And the new computer system and my insurance plan wasn't exactly the easiest to code in their systems.  Poor Maria.  She had to call in someone who was their head of everything accounting/systems and then they had to call a help line.   Maria had figured out the cost on paper and was trying to make the computerized total jive with it.  I brought out my knitting.  Thank goodness I can knit by touch, because I couldn't see much.  I knitted and smiled.  And watched hoards of senior citizens come and go, picking out glasses, picking up glasses, etc.

The totals never matched, so I gave up an arm and a leg put down a little more than 50% deposit on the glasses.  I thanked Maria, went home and promptly faxed in my flexible spending request to attempt to get my arm and leg back reimbursement quickly.

About half an hour after I faxed it in, Maria called.  They finally got the totals to do their thing and it turns out they owe me $40.  So, she was going to void the existing charge and run a new charge for the lower amount. 

Thankfully I'll have more reimbursement requests to fax in to the flexible spending folks and I'll reduce those totals by the adjusted charge amount.  Whew.

Used to be that my lenses were just about the same price or a little more than the frames.  With progressive lenses, that's all changed.  Oh well.  I hope I can adjust quickly!