It was two years ago that I spontaneously quit my horrible job in DC with nothing lined up (I sent my resignation in via email from my iPod Touch at an Au Bon Pain). It was a few months before the economy crashed, and I figured I would have no problem finding a job. Well, after two years, I have a full time permanant job again, starting on Monday. It's still the job where I've been bored and poorly managed as a temp, but it will pay better than I was getting while temping, and I figure I can find something else in the fall, or else things might get better. I am so relieved.

And now, I have to find an apartment. In two weeks ((sigh)) _

We took my grandmother to an Apple Store this afternoon to see if the iPad is the right "computer" for her. After more than two hours, we determined the answer was yes. (Her favorite part of the conversation was when she was talking to the sales guy who is a freshman art student, and they could talk about art, but she's excited about the machine in general.) After an hour of mooning around, playing with the iPads ourselves, and asking all the questions we could think of (and getting my stepdad to stop pressuring the poor kid about the fact that the machine doesn't have a camera -- seriously, the boy was 18, and was the floor sales guy, he did not need to hear my stepdad whine about the lack of camera), I got bored and pulled my Kindle out of my bag to read my book. Now, I love my Kindle, but next to the shiny, sleek, back lit iPads, it looked so low-tech. But I wound up with three Apple Store employees hovering, asking how the internet worked on it, and admiring how much the e-ink looks like paper. It was hilarious. (Also, the Kindle and the iPad are entirely different machines. I think I would wind up cross eyed if I tried to read a book on the iPad. And the internet search features on the Kindle kind of suck. No graphics at all.) _

I feel mildly embarassed to even be asking this, but, apparently there is some special election thing in Boston next week. And I have no idea what it is for, only that I should (apparently) vote in it. Anyone know? _

I have the finished a good book sulks. Poor me. Maybe I will curl up on my couch and finally watch The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in honor of poor Verity. _

I got an email from an old friend's father, who is going to meet his son's girlfriend for the first time, and aparently she went to St. John's. He was asking me for the secret handshake sort of quote that would let the girl know that he was well educated too. Am working very hard on not telling him that he probably doesn't want to start of his relationship with his son's girlfriend with a lie. _

Last night, at movie night, we discussed ghost stories from our colleges. Apparently, Smith has a ton. F&M has none. I couldn't remember any ghost stories from St. John's, except Nate's made up ghost of the liberty tree thing. Did we have any? Is it weird that we didn't have any? _

And now I can't sleep, I'm too stressed out. It's like my last weeks at AIARC, when I couldn't sleep and I thought I was going to throw up all the time. _

(Wow, when I break my "don't blog about work" rule, I really go for it, don't I?) _

I generally try not to blog about work, because I worry about that coming back and biting me in the ass, but I'm stressed by the situation where I'm temping, to the point where I spent most of Friday on the verge of tears, and it's just going to come up again tomorrow. I'm going to talk to my temp agency, I think, and get them to find me a new placement.

Friday a week ago, my boss's boss asked me to talk to her after everyone else had left, to see how things seemed to be going with me, blah, blah, etc. She said she wanted to do it after everyone had left because she didn't want to leave the front desk unattended, but I suspect (in retrospect) that it's because she didn't want people to know about the talk. Ultimately, the talk was her asking me leading questions getting me to tell her bad things about my boss. Who, while nice, is not a particularly great boss, whom I often don't see for days running, and as I sit at my desk and try to come up with something to do (hence: Farmville addiction). I was haphazardly trained in the database to know how to do some very basic data entry work, and I was basically taught nothing about the organization, and that was that. I was also trained by the girl who used to do my job, rather than my boss (which actually makes sense, I think), and more often than not, if something comes up and I have a question about what our standard procedure is, my boss's response is to ask the other girl (she's still part of the organization, she's just moved onto doing something else). My boss's boss seemed to think that was unacceptable, that I would ask the other girl. She was also not thrilled that if my boss went away on vacation for a week, chances are high I would have nothing to do. This is all true, but the way she was getting me to ask the questions was uncomfortable.  She ended the talk with "this conversation never happened."

As my sister pointed out, it is then that I should have realized that I need to have the "get me out of here" conversation with my temp agency.

This Friday, my boss and I had a meeting, where basically she laid into me for telling Janet that if she doesn't give me specific jobs, I have nothing to do. I pointed out that as far as I know, the only ongoing thing she has given me is this absurd maintance project that the first girl had largely taken care of right before I started, so the database is actually rather clean. She said something like, I thought we talked about you updating the manual. To which I said, well, maybe I could update the manual if I knew the database better, and while I can do what I need to do, I don't know very much about it, which was something she had said she was going to slowly work on teaching me. I am now supposed to write up a stupid little paper about what I think my role in the organization is, and what I think my boss thinks my job position is, and how much time I think the various projects we have come up with might take. I really really don't want to do this, but I told her I'd have it done by the end of the day tomorrow. I'm the receptionist and I don't know enough about the structure of the organization to know how to direct calls more than half the time.

And I am getting paid at the rate for a receptionist, which actually seems blatantly unfair. They wanted someone who understands databases, they were thrilled that I know Crystal, and they are only willing to pay me as a receptionist? I know it's a non-profit, but, come on...Also, as I said to my sister this evening, they're a non-profit that I don't really care anything about. It's not like I'm getting paid next to nothing to work for Amnesty International, where at least I would know they were doing something Good.

But, back to money. Our lease is up at the end of May, and I have to move. I don't begin to make enough money to pay anything like rent, especially with credit card debt and student loans, which causes unending stress. And I am so fucking tired of moving. I want to wake up in the morning and have a new job, and have a new nice apartment, and a nice roommate (because, frankly, who can afford a one bedroom place in Boston?). I am too overwhelmed by it all to feel like I can find a new job and a new apartment in a month. _

My grandmother knew Rube Goldberg (I didn't know he was a real person). And was once hit on by Marlon Brando, before he was famous.

My great grandmother knew Eugene O'Neill, and he wanted to her to come with him to Provincetown to do costume design. She didn't want to do it, because a good girl wouldn't associate with a theater person. My grandmother thinks she knew F. Scott Fitzgerald, too, they had a literary circle or something in New York. _

Jamie and I (really Jamie) are making tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes. We haven't done that ever, the two of us, and no one has done it in our house since we grew tomatoes. (And, really, since the cockatiel panicked while flying over the pot of tomato sauce. That was pretty traumatic for all involved. Poor Grumpy had no toes, and died a month later.) It smells delicious. Next time, however, we are buying more tomatoes at Haymarket. Three pounds was not enough, and at $1 for the three pounds we could have bought more without going broke (today, she ran down to the grocery store for more tomatoes, while I cooked pears and cardamom for sorbet.) _

Jamie and I went to Haymarket this afternoon, and spent $12 on leeks, 2 pounds of strawberries, 2 bunches of asparagus, 5 lemons, 2 cucumbers, 3 pounds of tomatoes, 7 or 8 pears, and a pound of green almonds. Tomorrow we're going to make fresh tomato sauce to go with fresh pasta from the North End to feed to a friend who's running the marathon, and pear sorbet. The green almonds we're not sure of yet, since we've never used them. We broke one open, and ate it. I have determined that it tastes kind of like a grape and kind of like the tender white part of a blade of grass. _

I want to do my hair like this. Any suggestions on how to do that? _

The Victoria Albert Museum has free vintage knitting patterns online. How cool is that? (Maybe I need some more work to do, I have been sitting here Googling 1940's sweater patterns.) _

I was so proud of myself, last night, filling out all my tax stuff. It was going to be the first time ever that I filed my taxes before April 15th. And then, stupid Massachusetts, I had to have all this tax information stuff about my health insurance, and I have basically lost every piece of paper I have ever recieved from my insurance company. I got locked out of their website by guessing my password wrong too many times. ((sigh)) So, I sent an email to my temp agency person to get the phone number for the insurance company, and, once again, I will be filing my taxes on April 15th.

(Not that April 14th is a huge improvement, but it was something.) _

If I type more than two numbers together, my hand goes to my number pad rather than the number row. I think Mavis Beacon would be disappointed in me. How many numbers does it take for you to go to the number pad? _

I am beyond thrilled that A Wrinkle in Time is number 2 here, but I think each individual Harry Potter book did not deserve to make the list.

^{((Also, this is me not being sulking about Charlotte's Web being number one. I realize that I am weird in seriously disliking that book.))} _

I went over to a friend's house this evening, for homemade pizza and a movie. We wound up watching The Lion in Winter (the proper one, with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn), which she had never seen (I was asked to bring "girly movies" and brought a random assortment of serious movies, costume dramas, and funny movies). We have decided that The Lion in Winter should be the new standard of how family gatherings went. "Well, it was a little stressful, but at least we didn't all wind up in the wine cellar with knives at each others' throats." _

I have the house to myself for the evening, and so I am listening to show music and singing loudly, which I do so rarely that my dogs look at me startled when I hit higher. _

This will mean very little to non-knitters, but I am freaking out because I have no idea how this happened.

I have this oh so clever technique where I do this thing called a Turkish cast on when I want to knit in two directions from one point. It's usually used for things like the toes of socks, but it's also an absolutely fabulous way to get around doing a "provisional cast on" which means you then have to pick the stitches up off of a piece of string, which always bothers me. A Turkish cast on involves two needles held together, and you wrap the yarn around them (seriously, you just wrap it in a circle. It is the coolest and easiest cast on in the world. It is totally awesome.) If you're not doing this for something that you just knit around and around in circles, you keep needle at one end and keep the other moving. I've done this many times with lace projects. I did this for the top of my Morningstar cardigan so I could do top down but still join the front and back. I felt so very clever. And then, about an hour ago, I picked it up for the evening, and found that my dead stitches had somehow come off the extra needle. Which was sitting on the coffe table, with the protection things still on it. I have no idea when I took this out. The project was on another floor. I am trying to pick it back up onto my needles, but I realized that it started to unravel at the beginning, and it is in a lace pattern. I don't think I can fix this except to tear it out.

I am trying to look on the bright side, that without any needles in I can really make sure that I got the proportions right, that it will fit. But, meanwhile, the possibility of wearing it to a wedding in six weeks is looking more and more remote, and it makes me want to cry. So I am going to put it aside, and make caramels and sulk. _