Timing is everything

I awoke this morning in pain again. In my sinuses again. Crap, I thought. Better head off the migraine right away by taking some Tylenol.

I rolled out of bed to head into the bathroom to dig out the Tylenol. As I did, I looked at my bedside clock radio. It was some ridiculous hour like 4:47 am. Well, pain will make a person wake up at a ridiculous hour, won’t it? I still had an hour and 45 more minutes to sleep.

I took the pills, peed, then padded back to bed. I wasn’t sure if I’d drift back to sleep, though. I knew I needed to, but it just didn’t feel quite right. Besides, my sinuses hurt.

I tossed and turned for an hour. The Tylenol wasn’t kicking in. I got up and took another one. I turned around and around in my bed like a chicken on a spit. At 6:15 am, my clock radio alarm went. I have it set to a talk radio station (yes, I am that old and boring). I listened idly to the weather and the traffic and the whatever else they broadcast at that time of day, waiting for the 6:30 news. That’s my cue to get up, sinus pain or no sinus pain.

The traffic reporter said something about 7:20 am. It vaguely registered in my foggy brain that she’d given the incorrect time.

The announcer soon intoned that the news to 7:30 was coming up. Another mistake, I thought.

Wait. Another wrong time?

I sat up in confusion and looked carefully at my clock radio. It showed 6:29 am. What?

I grabbed my cell phone. I’d turned it off the night before so I stabbed frantically at the buttons to turn it on. The time on it? 7:29 am.

WTF?

I jumped out of bed, throbbing sinuses and all. I clattered downstairs and checked the wall clock, the stove clock, the microwave clock. They all showed (by now) 7:30 am.

BIG WTF!

Somehow, my clock radio lost exactly an hour. I have no idea how this happened, but I suspect something to do with the daylight saving time button. Did I inadvertently push it as I was setting the alarm the night before? How could I possibly have done that – it’s a tiny button at the back, not exactly front and centre.

Still, I managed to pull myself together and I got to work by 8:15 am, which was about 20 or 25 minutes later than usual. Not too bad, all things considered. And my headache eventually disappeared, too.

But I am a little concerned about tomorrow morning. I think I might need a rooster.

Who ya gonna call?

I was driving home from work today, minding my own business. I’d just turned onto a busy four-lane road that leads up a hill to a traffic light, where I then turn left down my own street and from there, into my driveway.

I heard the wail of a siren. (Apparently I didn’t have my stereo cranked too loudly this time. That has happened in the past.) I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw the lights of an approaching ambulance.

I was in a line-up of four vehicles, in the left lane. I know you’re supposed to move to the right and stop while the ambulance passes, but there were more vehicles in the right lane, so I really had nowhere to go. I chose to stop right where I was.

The two cars ahead of me did the same thing. As the ambulance came closer, the three of us didn’t move. But the white SUV directly behind me did.

The joker in the driver’s seat decided to drift over into the right lane, regardless of the what the cars already there were doing. Fortunately, they had all pulled over to the far right, beside the curb, and were waiting motionless, just like it says to do in the driver’s manual.

But our friend in the white SUV had obviously never read a driver’s manual. This brainiac kept on driving, slowly, in the right lane, with the ambulance coming up fast to the rear. The SUV finally rolled to a stop pretty much in the middle of an intersection, and the ambulance threaded its way around it. The ambulance returned to the lane which the SUV was now blocking, and when it picked up speed, so did the SUV, right on its tail. In this manner, the SUV passed everybody who was correctly stopped either in the left lane or on the right side of the road.

The rest of us watched this twit zoom up the road, as if in pursuit of the ambulance. Then we started moving again up the hill, sedately.

I just don’t understand how some people think that their time is so much more valuable than that of paramedics in an ambulance trying to get to a medical emergency as quickly as possible. In a perfect world, these would be the people who one day have their own medical emergency, but the ambulance cannot get there quickly enough due to incompetent drivers blocking their progress.

But that probably won’t happen.

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Pinklea’s political rant (to be read at your own risk):

The paramedics here in BC are currently on strike and have been since April 1. The thing is, they are an essential service, and as such, the public hasn’t seen as much disruption to their life as might be expected if, for example, grocery store employees were on strike. People make that 911 call, and an ambulance still shows up. The government doesn’t seem to want to negotiate better ambulance service for all, as well as better working conditions and a fair wage increase for these hard-working people. I don’t know any of the details about what the paramedics are asking for or what the government is offering or even if they are going to mediation soon, but I do think that a six-month strike is ridiculous (hello, OC Transpo?). Surely there is some room for compromise before people start to die at an alarming rate. Surely, if they are deemed an essential service, the government can treat them like one, with updated and properly tested equipment, sane working hours and conditions, and wages that match the importance of their work.

There. Political statement over. Back to our regular programming.

E-junk

This is the junk drawer in my desk. It’s a very particular junk drawer, though. It only holds electronic junk. Only MY electronic junk, too, because DD has her own desk with her own electronic junk drawer.

Now, you can probably see that this junk drawer of mine contains a lot of electrical and computer-y cords. These are from the various computers I have owned: two laptops, an iMac, and an old and ungainly Apple Power PC. There are also a few computer cords, still in their store bags, that were purchased for whatever reason and never used (or returned, apparently). I hide those at the bottom of the drawer so even I don’t have to see them too often.

There is a GPS that Porsche Guy got me for Christmas last year. I’ve used it twice. It’s a complicated thing! Also, I haven’t done a lot of road trips since it came to live with me, so I really haven’t needed its services. Still, I do pull it out every now and then and play with it. Unfortunately, I then have to pretend that I’m starting out in Toronto, because that’s the default it’s set to, and I haven’t yet determined how to permanently change that to my actual location. The GPS came with many accessories, but it didn’t come with a guide book, and what I’ve found on-line isn’t the exact model that I have. Most of the directions on-line do apply, but they’re also startlingly vague in some crucial areas for me. So it’s an ongoing learning process.

The drawer also contains the little transparent plastic box that my iPod came in, and two sets of earbuds. One is white and visible in the photo. The other is pink (quelle surprise!) and is either in my purse on on top of the desk, just waiting to be hooked up to the iPod so we can all go for a walk.

There’s a plastic bag that holds the owner’s manual for my digital camera, which actually belonged to DD till last June, when she bought a new one. In addition, that bag has the memory card reader – and its cord! – that I use to download photos to my laptop. Oh yes – and the camera itself is somewhere in there, in a black and silver case. It must be under the plastic bag.

There’s a piece of paper upon which is written the necessary codes and settings for my wireless router. I have no clue what all those sequences of letters and numbers and symbols mean, but I’m told that they all make the router do things. Wireless things. I didn’t set the system up. (I guess that’s obvious, isn’t it?)

There’s a white box of set-up CDs for my laptop’s word processing program. This one has a thick instruction booklet, thank goodness. So I could refer to it, if I needed to. If I did something other than blog or play computer games, that is. And there are more set-up CDs beneath that white box, for my laptop’s operating system and the software for both my printer and my router.

This drawer also has this pen thrown into it. You can’t see much of the pen in the photo, but it’s orangy with a black and white penguin head. It’s called a “Popeyed Pen”, and when you squeeze the penguin’s head, its googly eyes spring out in a fish-like manner. It’s kind-of creepy, now that I think of it!

And what is that pen doing in my electronic junk drawer anyway? It’s not electronic or computer-y by any stretch of the imagination. I have a whole different place for pens and other writing instruments. This pen is in the wrong place!

Heavy sigh. Now I have to reorganize everything.

Sock it to me

When I bought my car last year, one of the perks from my dealer was a fifty-dollar gift card to a rather upscale clothing store. I’m not going to name it, but let’s just say that people like me don’t shop there on a regular basis. We can barely afford to window shop there, but there I was with free money to spend at that store. So off PG and I went to check it out.

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually like any of the clothes I saw. I even offered to put the money toward something for PG, but he didn’t like any of the men’s clothes either. It was all weird colours and weird styles for weird people (not that I’m biased or anything). Also, the prices were, as expected, out of my league. Which was fine, I thought. I didn’t see a single item that I liked anyway.

Still, I had 50$ to spend there and only there.

I was disappointed, but resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to buy anything there. Ever. Then PG said, “What about socks? There must be some socks here that you could buy.”

I perked up. I LOVE socks and own lots of funky pairs. Another few pairs are always welcome in my sock drawer.

PG, in the meantime, had marched over to the cash desk to ask where they kept their socks, because we hadn’t seen any as we had wandered around the shop. The woman there pointed to a couple of small baskets on the counter behind us. Two small baskets only. I pounced on them.

There wasn’t a lot of colours or designs to choose from, but I did pull out a pair of black socks with brown and green palm trees all over them. I could wear those, I thought. I looked at the price tag.

Twenty-one dollars and ninety-five cents.

Yes.

I could buy TWO pairs of socks with my fifty-dollar gift card. Two. Just two.

So I found another pair that I liked and bought my two pairs of socks. Free money, after all.

And now that I’ve worn those twenty-one dollar and ninety-five cent socks a few times, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that they are shitty socks. They are too thin and they don’t stay up at all.

I’m throwing them out.

Unless somebody else wants twenty-one dollar and ninety-five cent socks that are too thin and don’t stay up at all for free?

Ms Fix-it

When I had fully recovered from my weekend of fun and frolic and went back to work on Monday, I turned my attention to my classroom. You remember, the one in which there had to be a massive cleanup due to the discovery of vermiculite laced with asbestos? Oh okay, if you want to be picky, it ended up being a cleanup of every single classroom in the whole school, but this is my blog so I’ll write what I want. And I want to write about my classroom.

So: one of my tables was wobbly. I only figured this out when I sat down with a kid the other day and got him to do some writing. He was just a little kid, but that table nearly buckled under the pressure of his skinny little arm. So that needed to be fixed. All that was necessary was to tighten the screws on each adjustable leg of the table, so this wouldn’t be a huge job.

I had also unearthed a room divider to separate the kids’ computer station from the rest of the room. This divider is necessary because while I’m teaching small groups of kids, I’d prefer that they not be disturbed too much by other kids who come in at various times during the day to work independently on this special computer program on one of the two laptops in the corner. This program is supposed to “retrain the brain”, but we only got it at our school last spring and no one has yet completed the program, so I’m not sure if anyone’s brain has actually been modified thus far.

But anyway, this divider was exactly what I needed – except that it too was extremely wobbly. When the principal and I had carted it down to my classroom, we had flipped it over to see how its stands were attached, and he had quickly deduced that the nuts just needed tightening. Preferably with a wrench. Finger tightening wouldn’t quite work for this job.

Now, for little repairs like these, we are supposed to ask our custodians. They, of course, have nothing better to do than to fix things for teachers. Clean the school? Nah, not when there’s things to fix!

And if the job is too big or complicated for them, we are supposed to put in a work order for someone from the maintenance crew to come out and do whatever it is. Sure, and they’ll show up in about six weeks. And in the meantime, whatever needed to be fixed has now completely broken and must now be replaced at great cost.

So I brought my good wrench and my trusty screwdriver to school this morning. And I tightened the screws on that table just like that. And I quickly got the nuts on that divider good and tight too. Nothing wobbled any more. I was most pleased with myself!

I put the room divider back into its place beside the computer station. I’d had to move out another table (not the previously-wobbly one) to pull the divider out, so now I shoved that table back against the wall. Just a little too enthusiastically, possibly …

The clock on the wall of the classroom next door to mine immediately crashed to the ground. Its plastic cover popped off and the clock stopped ticking. I don’t think I can fix it with my wrench and screwdriver.